When referring to drafting international commercial contract, high-profile facility agreement, and other commercial transaction designations as well as legal research & publication, Western-educated lawyers, legal practitioners, and legal researchers are often judged to be much more qualified than the Asian/African-educated ones.
By far, legal education in Asia is deemed lacking resources, from which other negative aspects were laid claim to; meager publications, lack of qualified instructors, as well as requiring sophistication and spontaneity from the legal practitioners and non-practitioners.
In retrospect to the cause of the above mental phenomenon, it is true that law was initially fabricated within the Western world; and over myriad of decades, laws in the Western world have become much more sophisticated and civilized than the Asian and African jurisdictions. It is even true when most law firms in Asia and Africa are owned, directed and even named after one or more Western lawyers. Law firms, law associations, law schools and other legal entities offering legal services would attract more clients or be entrusted with more esteems than the local-owned ones.
Once I have thought that cross-border business transaction and diplomacy would gravely alleviate the above status quo, but in fact it does not. But thanks to the large numbers of Western legal scholars and professors who have committed to building legal foundations for Asians and the Africans and their desires to help us in legislating our own laws. So we must be more than ready to solidify our own legal foundations, augment our being meager legal resources, and if the Western legal scholars really want to help us, they must be ready to build Asian-oriented/African-oriented legal resources and foundations.
A Western legal scholar who wishes not to be named, said that if western professors really care about you and the other five billion people living outside North American and Western Europe they would go to work in your country at its wages and use the expertise that they have gained at the expense of the standard of living of the majority of the people in the world to give something back. This is what the Asia, Africa and the Middle East, particularly need to press for; shifting resources back towards use in favor of the majority of the people in the world.
I am seeing African, Asian and the Middle Eastern law schools rising to the challenges of creating their own foundations and the legal resources originated from their owned jurisdictions, which are as good as the West. Western professors who want to enhance legal education in Africa, Asia and Middle East shall go to teach in these places for local wages or help these schools to get access to the best research resources that are available in western schools, and which in some cases have been stolen from the South. It is really true that many law schools in Asia, Africa or the Middle East have professors who understand international law better than their colleagues in Western law schools and we are seeing an increasing number of law students in Asia, Africa or the Middle East are more qualified and sophisticated than the Western-educated ones, who are being crazed with gluts of resources, since they have striven to absorbed and achieved from the meager legal resources.
Without existence of commercial, labor, and administrative courts, and internationally standardized commercial arbitration entity with international jurisdiction, like Singapore, Hong Kong and other business nations, and its meager legal resources, Cambodian law students, legal practitioners and non-practitioners shall see these challenges and be ready to penetrate through these barricades, in order to shatter this status quo.
I have a dream that one day we will stand in the equal footing to enter into legal competition with just anyone from anywhere in this globalized world.
The opinion expressed in this comment is the personal opinion of Mr. Lay Vicheka himself, and TOTALLY does not related to any workplace and association with which he is affiliated with.