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The announcement comes after Columbia set up a new disciplinary committee and initiated its own investigations into students critical of Israeland its war on Gaza after Hamas’s own attack on Israel. That move by the university has alarmed advocates of free speech.
It also comes at a time of widespread backlash to American universities by the Trump administration and conservatives more broadly who see the higher education sector in the US as dominated by liberals and ripe for a rightwing attack on its influence.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/07/trump-administration-cancels-columbia-university-funding
Also, if you need any further reasons not to be too sad over this, I can tell you from detailed knowledge of the U.S. system that LLM students can be at an immense intellectual disadvantage in their universities, anyway. Take just one example: the Philosophy of Public Property seminar that Seana Shiffrin takes at UCLA. One constituency of students for this class is LLM students in Legal Philosophy, true. But that's a very small constituency. The other constituencies include: JD students and PhD students in the Department of Philosophy (remember, UCLA isn't a stand-alone law school like NLSIU, for example, so it has multiple degree-awarding faculties). All these other constituencies (JD and Philosophy PhD) of students have better philosophical training than at least most Indian law students going there (to the U.S., that is) for an LLM. Combine that with the curve grading policy that many Indian universities have copied from the Americans, the complexity of content for a seminar like this and you get a recipe of high chances of not being able to do well. Tell me, considering just one career - academia and considering if you wanted to do that abroad: taking other factors into account (difficulties for getting selected to an SJD (U.S. law PhD programme), these structural disadvantages in the LLM environment, the fact that SJD graduates (even from the best American universities) are basically never hired in the U.S.), why would you even want to go to a system that disadvantages you at every turn, even if they are giving you some faltu (in the larger scheme of things) financial aid amount to study? Seems to me like the disadvantages outweigh the advantages (speaking as someone who has benefitted from LLM-level teaching in a country that is neither the U.S. nor India from someone who did both an LLM and SJD from Yale).
It would be very helpful if you could provide a bit more clarity maybe if you do know more about other LLM degrees like Bucerius, Leiden etc pls do send in your thoughts!
2. If law firm lateral move is what you want, LLM is a very expensive and very uncertain, way to do it. Honestly, most of those kinds that you describe (people making lateral moves after one or two years) are not because those Indian lawyers have done LLM degrees in Britain or the U.S., but because their work experience has been valued by the foreign law firms, they have recruited the associates based on those associates' networking and applying, those associates have a year or so to spare before they start their jobs overseas, so they take degrees from unis that will boost up their CV. In other words, the LLM has very little to do with the candidate's securing a job. Most people who need to resort to reading for an LLM in the UK, at least, to try and secure a job either face no end of difficulties, or fail to do it. As evidence of this, see the YouTube channel of this guy called Gordon Chung. He's from Hong Kong and was at Baker McKenzie's London office for about five years (two years long training contract, three years PQE) and has now gone back to his home country for some personal reasons. He took his law degree from Hong Kong and a master's from Cambridge, but despite this - having good law degree marks (obviously, as he got into Cambridge) and good marks at Cambridge - faced loads of difficulties to get into Bakers. As for lateral moves to the U.S., I actually can't speak to as well, because I don't know that law firm market as well, so maybe some level of credibility is gained by doing one. I will say though, again, that the only LLM student I know of in the U.S. who stayed back to work there was one who did LLM from UCLA, had worked in the European office of a global law firm and had made an arrangement with his home city's office of that firm that he would transfer to the LA office; the transfer criteria required an LLM, or something like that, I believe. If you do want to do a UK LLM, do it for the right reasons: its best value will be in courtroom advocacy careers like being a barrister, policy/thinktank work maybe and academia.
3. There's one thing you must understand about the western world, which seemingly your online research hasn't been helpful in conveying. As point no. 2 should have helped illustrate, moving abroad isn't, and has never been, as easy as you described (maybe you wrote that way for brevity, which is fine). But things are changing now, and not for the better, and sadly, our education system is not adapting to those changing realities. We hardly need to state that the Americans have been a hell lot insular as a legal market and have now taken insularity steroids (see election result, November 2024). Britain is not very much better. They have elected a bunch of people who are instinctually more liberal (a Labour administration led by the former human rights lawyer and immigrants rights advocate, Sir Kerr Starmer KC), but who are having to deal with the consequences of a prior government's complete bungling of the immigration system, higher education sector finances (and other things), which resulted in unbelievable numbers of people immigrating to the UK in the last three years. If you look up the statistics, they are objectively not good - way too high. Therefore, much as they may not like it, even the British are having to turn the taps to a much lower volume. This means that some of the things we could aspire to previously may be harder to achieve. This is because, unlike let us say IT workers or healthcare workers, the UK doesn't have a lawyer shortage problem and hasn't had. Therefore, their legal sector's insentives to advocate for liberal immigration rules are less, and therefore, the sector's own ideas of what they define as talent can afford to be quite narrow. In other words, they don't feel all that much of a need to shove their hands into an international talent pool. Their political masters, regardless of their own feelings in the matter, also find it politically convenient (because of peoples' concern at the immigration levels, both regular and irregular migration) at this time to discourage too much international talent pool diving.
When I say our institutions aren't coping with this reality, I would more blame our government and regulator. Unlike UK universities, for example, the flexibility given to our universities to make certain unique pedagogical arrangements is limited. King's, for example, has a so-called 'dual degree' tie-up with Georgetown, which involves studying the core modules required for a British LLB at King's for two years, and doing an accellerated JD at Georgetown for another two years, entitling the one who has successfully completed this programme of study to gain the dual degree of LLB-JD from King's and Georgetown, entitling the holder of this qualification to qualify and work both in England and Wales and U.S. jurisdictions. Please don't be disingenuous and say "But we have exchange programmes", because you know in your heart of hearts that the value of those compared to the setup between KCL and Georgetown, or similar ones that UCL and LSE have with Columbia, is much lesser. In this time of increasing insularity, I could easily imagine an American law firm asking international candidates to go for a JD, even if they have good Indian qualifications and work experience, making it a de facto ban against Indian lawyers immigrating to the U.S. Such tie-ups are one of the only ways to navigate around such insularity.
PS (1): Sorry for the long responses. Your questions seem genuine, so I am trying to genuinely trying to engage and communicate, as best I can, my own knowledge and experience from having spent time abroad. Hope this wall of text was useful.
PS (2): There is inevitable trolling on this website. One possible set of people who may be encouraged to troll this response is Jindal people, who might scream about the value of linkages they have (or may have had) with certain foreign universities. Unless you can produce (1) evidence of how many dual-qualified lawyers (Indian and American, let us say) that has resulted in; and (2) levels of foreign work placement, please do not respond to this, I have zero interest in PR or dick measuring.