Abstract:

Legal practice is increasingly shaped by globalisation, technological advancement, and cross-border legal interaction. While South African law schools traditionally focus on domestic legal doctrine grounded in Roman-Dutch law and statutory interpretation, the contemporary legal profession requires lawyers to engage with legal issues that extend beyond national boundaries. International commercial transactions, multinational corporate regulation, global human rights frameworks, and comparative constitutional jurisprudence increasingly influence legal practice. Despite these developments, the South African law curriculum remains largely domestically oriented, with limited structured engagement with global legal systems. This paper argues that South African legal education must evolve to better prepare students for a transnational legal environment. The need for such reform is particularly significant for Generation Z law students, who are entering a profession characterised by digital connectivity, increased professional mobility, and technologically mediated legal processes. The emergence of legal technology, virtual courtrooms, online dispute resolution platforms, and cross-border legal collaboration has significantly reduced geographical barriers in legal practice, bringing legal systems and practitioners closer together than ever before. The study adopts a desktop research methodology, drawing on existing scholarly literature, policy discussions, and research on the globalisation of the legal profession and the evolving competencies required of modern lawyers. Through an analysis of academic literature on comparative legal education, international legal practice, and curriculum reform, the paper identifies the growing importance of global legal literacy as a core professional competency. In addition to preparing students for cross-jurisdictional legal practice, greater exposure to global legal systems at undergraduate level may also strengthen postgraduate legal study, particularly for students pursuing specialised LLM programmes or research in international, comparative, and transnational law. The paper therefore proposes that integrating comparative and global legal perspectives into the South African law curriculum can enhance both undergraduate legal training and postgraduate academic development, while ensuring that legal education remains responsive to the evolving realities of modern legal practice.

Keywords:

Legal education, Global legal literacy, Comparative legal systems, Curriculum reform, Generation Z, Technology, Law Students.