November 14, 2003

Ramblin' man: law professor and world traveler

by Carly St. Romain, A'06, Intern in the Offices of Public Affairs and Publications

Professor of Law David Gruning just cannot seem to stay put. In the past dozen years, the ability to teach American law in French has taken himaround the world to several French law schools: Lyon, Paris, and Caen, He also traveled to Madagascar as a consultant on constitutional reform, to Morocco for a series of seminars on the "Role of the Judge in Anglo-American Law," then to Quebec where the University of Montreal asked him to help design a new graduate program in American law, which he did. And then they asked him to teach in the program. "Essentially," he says, "they hooked me. How could I say no?" He took a leave from Loyola, inaugurated the program in the fall of 2001, and continued for two years. Now, he is back in the Crescent City and at Loyola.

In Quebec, law is taught as an undergraduate discipline; thus, Gruning's students there had already completed four years of legal study. The graduate program, whose official title is the Diplôme des études supérieures spécialisées (D.E.S.S.) in North American Common Law, is a one-year program with several aims, all of which require the program to be selective and demanding. One aim is to prepare students trained in Quebec civil law to pass a common-law bar examination, like Ontario or New York's (two of his students in the first class took and passed the New York bar). Another aim is to encourage further graduate study of the Anglo-American legal system, at the master's and doctoral levels. A more general aim, though, is to prepare Montreal lawyers to deal with their American counterparts. "Quebec does an enormous amount of business with U.S. firms," Gruning notes, "and American lawyers usually insist on a choice of American law for any contract they negotiate."

At the University of Montreal, Gruning also coached the first two teams to compete in the Willem C. Vis International Arbitration Moot in Vienna, Austria. More than 100 teams from universities around the world participate in this competition every year. This past year the University of Montreal team progressed to the second round, with recognition for superior oral advocacy. "I was very proud," says Gruning, especially since the competition is in English, a second language for the Montreal students. Loyola has placed in the final eight in this competition for three consecutive years.

The meeting of legal systems, however, is Gruning's main professional interest in the Montreal connection. Like Louisiana, Quebec is governed by civil law and common law, a combination of French and Anglo-American law. Both have civil codes that come out of the French tradition, and both have recently revised those codes. "If you take the new codes, you can look at the way the two traditions address various problems and you can see how the two systems compete or work together. I was always very tempted to go to Quebec to see this happening." As a result, while in Montreal, Gruning presented two papers discussing the relationship between civil law and common law: "Mapping Society Through Law: Louisiana Civil Law Recodified" and "Bayou State Bijuralism: The Common Law and the Civil Law in Louisiana."

For Gruning, living in Montreal proved to be "a challenge but a very good experience." He hopes that other professors will make the trip. Loyola Professor of Law James Étienne Viator delivered a paper on Marbury v. Madison in Montreal last year. This year, on November 13, Professor Adrian Popovici of the University of Montreal will speak at Loyola on "Personality rights: A civil law concept." In addition, Montreal has invited Gruning to discuss the law of unjust enrichment at the end of January. "My wife is a businesswoman," says Gruning. "She could care less about the paper. She is planning where we will go cross-country skiing, and this is from a Louisiana girl who had hardly seen snow before!"

It is difficult for Gruning to decide what he values most from his experience in Montreal. "Too much to choose just one thing," he says. "The overall experience, meeting colleagues with a similar interest, the opportunity to work and function in a completely foreign language, the opportunity to live and function in a foreign culture. It is odd to live as an outsider. But now that I have done it, I know I could do it again." He just may get the chance; the two universities have agreed in principle that Gruning can share his time in New Orleans and Montreal.

Gruning has been speaking French for almost 30 years and if he had never started studying the language, he says he would have missed innumerable opportunities. "The moral of the story is study a foreign language," he says. " You never know where it's going to take you."