“The program will be something unique in that it is designed for foreign lawyers who want to expand their knowledge of the American legal system,” she said.

Feeheley said the goal is to send five to six MSU professors to Dubai, each for about a week, so they can still teach their regular schedules at MSU. Hopefully, the program will have between 10 and 20 students, she said.

Bruce Bean, a law professor who is director of the L.L.M. program for foreign educated lawyers in the College of Law, will be traveling to Dubai with the program.

“We don’t know if they will be receiving a certificate or a degree,” he said. “Having not done any courses, we won’t know what the demand (for the program) will be.”

MSU would have been happy to have a program in Saudi Arabia, but because the Saudi Arabian government does not allow men to teach women or women to teach men, that was not a possibility for MSU, he said. But the hope is that students from regions around Dubai will be able to commute to take classes that meet MSU’s operating standards — in Dubai, male professors can teach females, and vice versa.

“(For Michigan residents), it is like going to Detroit,” Bean said. “It is easier than uprooting your life and terminating your current career to come to East Lansing, and I understand that it is a very metropolitan, cosmopolitan kind of place.”

Eric Berlin, a second-year law student and president of the Jewish Legal Society, said he thinks the program is a positive step forward for the College of Law in developing an international reputation. The specific program dealing with Dubai is positive and beneficial to those looking to learn more about American law, but it isn’t a final educational step, he said.

“I don’t know if it is necessarily comparable to going through an entire semester worth of work,” Berlin said. “Considering the people in the program already have full-time jobs and have a lot on their plate through jobs and families, I think it is beneficial and would be a good starting point.”