Date Written: February 21, 2023
Abstract
Peking University’s School of Transnational Law (“STL”), by most measures, has been an unqualified success. STL’s American law J.D. program – China’s only American law J.D. – is comparable in all substantial respects to the J.D. programs of leading U.S. law schools. STL’s China law Juris Master’s degree – with which STL’s J.D. is offered jointly – is reshaping the content and objectives of Chinese legal education and influencing legal education nationally. The value that students derive from the combination of STL’s J.D. and J.M. curriculums exceeds the value of studying each independently of the other.
Demand for admission to STL among China’s most academically gifted college graduates is extremely high. STL has recruited a multinational faculty of leading scholars, all of whom subscribe to the case study method of instruction with intensely interactive class sessions, including within STL’s largely civil law J.M. curriculum. The professional placement of STL graduates in world-leading Chinese and multinational law firms, businesses, government offices, and universities is exceptional, even during the recent economic downturn resulting from the pandemic. STL enjoys a steadily growing alumni base on the cusp of leadership in China and elsewhere. And STL provides all of this to students at very low cost, with an annual tuition not even 25 percent of that at most leading U.S. law schools.
Yet, because STL is an academic unit of a leading Chinese research university rather than a campus of an American university operating by special dispensation in China, STL is fully subject to Peking University and China Ministry of Education/central government regulations, policies, and practices. As a result, STL faces certain endemic challenges capable of jeopardizing its unique program and achievements. These include censorship, constraints on faculty governance, the absence of well-established standards for the profession of law, and the lingering effects of a “Zero Covid” policy that effectively deprived STL for three years of the international engagement on which its program largely depends.
This article examines these challenges, how STL contends with each, the prognosis for STL maintaining its academic independence and excellence, and STL’s evolution from an American law program in China into perhaps the world’s only true School of Transnational Law. Today, STL’s program blends the study of China law, U.S. law, and other legal regimes in ways designed to equip students for the practice of law in a world in which parties from different nations and legal traditions – including exclusively non-Western traditions – increasingly interact.
Keywords: China, legal education, Zero Covid, censorship, faculty governance, legal profession, non-Western, Juris Master's, Peking University
JEL Classification: K33, K40
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