Nathalie Feix grew up in Switzerland, spent her undergraduate years at the University of Geneva and earned a master's degree in public policy from the London School of Economics. When she decided to study law, though, she skipped Europe's élite institutions and enrolled at the University of Miami. Why? Feix, 26, who worked for Hewlett-Packard in Geneva last summer, explains that U.S. law schools have "law reviews, moot court, judicial clerkships, litigation training—things that aren't available in Europe."

And she has another reason: U.S. law is becoming the lingua franca of international business. Last year 1,400 foreign nationals enrolled in standard three-year programs at U.S. law schools. An additional 2,800 enrolled in master of laws programs—a 62% increase since 1996. Most of these master's students have earned law degrees in other countries and find the programs attractive because they can usually be completed in one year.

How is it that a field as culturally idiosyncratic as law is attracting so many foreign students to U.S. shores? There's a simple answer. The knowledge these students gain of American-style contracts, corporate accounting and securities law makes them valuable for negotiating international deals—either for companies or law firms in their homelands or for U.S. multinationals. With American firms representing clients who hold the purse strings in much of global commerce, they often get to draft the legal language that governs cross-border deals. That has made New York State law, in particular, a global gold standard, often invoked in a transaction even when neither party is based in the U.S. "It's become a neutral, third-party law," says Jeff Lewis, a partner at the New York City firm Cleary, Gottlieb. "In Asia and Latin America, when a state enterprise auctions off assets, the legal documents are often written to be governed by New York law. It's done to attract American investment."

With European economies becoming more competitive, U.S.-trained lawyers are also in high demand there. "American laws and business structures—from antitrust to corporate law to securities law—are attuned to competitive product markets," says Harvard law professor Mark Roe. His Harvard colleague William Alford says U.S. law schools excel at "teaching problem solving," which makes their graduates broadly useful within corporations. Foreign graduates of U.S. law schools are especially prized by recruiters because they're often multilingual and bring special knowledge of their countries and regions. Says Lewis: "They're the glue that helps us stay together as a global firm."

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