Once every decade or so, the ABA’s annual meeting is set in London. It appears to be a popular decision, and why not? It allows a lawyer to fly to Europe and deduct the cost as a business expense, making the vacation that surrounds the meeting just a little bit cheaper (and in a weak dollar era, that’s not a bad thing). The ABA justifies its decision as giving American lawyers a chance to better understand the roots of the American legal system by studying the English common-law system. So, lawyers visit the Inns of Court, maybe take in a lecture or panel discussion from English lawyers and judges, and even visit the courts. But does one really learn anything applicable to the practice of law (or even the theory of law) from this event? (I put aside for now the question whether one learns anything from any ABA annual meeting.) The ABA’s justification is both true and trite. The English legal system serves as a broad-based template for the American legal system (with some exceptions that followed civil law), but large differences began to emerge by the early nineteenth century, and a distinctly American legal system was in place by no later than the end of the nineteenth century. How the country that gave us trial by jury managed to eliminate it in civil matters is interesting but dated and of little concern to nearly all American lawyers. Further, and more importantly, the English and American legal systems remain but a shadow of their former common-law selves. We live not just in an age of statutes (as Yale Law Professor and now federal appeals court Judge Guido Calabresi noted), but in an age of regulations and ordinances, of written laws unending. No, the reason to go to London is because it is a taxpayer-financed boondoggle.

Like the ABA, law schools may have initially found the lure of European travel the reason for the development of summer abroad programs.