29/11/2022
James Lupo, a second-generation Italian-American has 14 years of experience as a professor of practice at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, having previously worked as a commercial litigator in Chicago where he represented financial institutions.
He has been coming to the global city of Madrid for over 12 years to work alongside his expert colleagues and passionate students, as well as connect with his European roots. His key areas of interest lie in the body of law that involves equity and how we perceive the concept of what is just on a case-by-case basis, as well as the aspects of commercial law that involve persuasion, argumentation and interpretation. The relationship between those ideas and how they interact fascinates him.
We caught up with James Lupo to find out more about how the partnership between IE Law School and Northwestern School of Law benefits future lawyers and students of the Executive LL.M.
What is the importance of the partnership between IE Law School and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law?
I think the relationship between Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and IE Law School is incredibly important. In today’s legal practice world, we find the lives of American lawyers and international lawyers to be increasingly intertwined. There is tremendous globalization in the practice of law.
These kinds of relationships are incredibly important not only for the institutions to heighten their sensitivity to these dynamics as they develop but also for practitioners.
In this Executive Master, students realize that the problems they address and the clients they represent are increasingly international and global. So I think it’s important in a macro sense that institutions like IE Law School and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law should come together and work through their ideas of education together. It’s also incredibly important on a micro level for the individual students in the program because their problems, requirements and obligations are increasingly international.
What are the outcomes and benefits of the Executive LL.M.?
The benefit of participating in this Executive Master for international practitioners is based on the fact that the practice of law is increasingly global. It’s well beyond the nature of the clients, and the nature of the problems that they will be asked to ascertain and then resolve.
It’s a sense of assimilating to another culture; understanding a different ethos and the way international attorneys think about problems in different ways.
The program also teaches students to work with people from different countries. It’s not so much just thinking about law, but thinking about how the practice of law affects their lives and how their families relate to them because being a lawyer asks a lot of an individual.
How does this program make an impact on a participant’s professional career?
I teach the course in contract law in this program and I think it’s a very beneficial class for international students. I am almost certain that students will not walk away from my class as experts in contract law, but that is far from the intention of this class. It’s identical to the first-year class I teach to JD students in the US to show them the realm of possibilities and opportunities that lawyers can present to clients. It’s more about creativity, interpretation and argumentation than it is about discrete issues.
What they benefit from is an experienced practitioner and teacher’s ability to look at the legal field from a multiplicity of angles.
They learn to see what’s different about the varying approaches, as well as learn how to be lawyers in a common law jurisdiction.
What makes this program unique?
I have years of experience in this program between IE Law School and Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and what makes it unique year after year is the quality and diversity of the individual students and what they have brought to the learning experience and the relationships they have developed.
