The legal profession, like the clients it serves, is well on the way to going global—but especially in India, obstacles to its spread remain

LAW is supposed to be about universal principles: rules that apply without prejudice to a broad category of human beings, regardless of sex, culture or economic status. So in a world where barriers to the transfer of goods, expertise and people are coming down, you might expect that the legal profession would be among the first to fuse into a seamless transnational fraternity. In history, whenever cross-border commerce has flourished, as in medieval Venice, so too have trade lawyers with broad horizons, like the ones pictured above. And today, at least from the vantage-point of the ambitious practitioner, the legal profession seems to have little respect for borders.

A talented graduate from any of the world’s top law schools can expect a life of globe-trotting. A single month’s work can include writing the small print on a Saudi investment in Africa, helping an Indonesian firm to market its shares in New York, and writing a contract under English law between two companies in Russia. Humanitarian law, as well as the commercial sort, is going global: these days nobody would be surprised to see an American lobby group test the principle of “universal jurisdiction” (for egregious crimes) by trying to get an African dictator arrested on a shopping trip to Europe. …