Duke Law in China: Building a Program
By Frances Presma
Building a Program...
Professor Jonathan Ocko has been teaching classes in Chinese law
and society at the Law School since the early 1980s. A scholar of Chinese history, he started traveling to China in 1982, shortly after Chairman Deng Xiaoping sanctioned the end of the country's
extreme isolation. China, says Ocko, started rebuilding its legal system from scratch in the late 1970s, looking all over the world for sources of law.
"[T]hey borrowed from civil law countries like Taiwan and Japan, and for their property law, they borrowed from the German Civil Code. Laws relating to public and private international law often show a stronger Anglo-American influence.
"It is a process that is still ongoing. First the Chinese had to establish a legal framework, and then build a cohort of judges and lawyers trained in the legal framework."
It was against that backdrop that then-Dean Paul Carrington was contacted, in 1980, by the first Chinese student seeking admission. Shi Xi-min '85, a graduate of China's University of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, arrived in 1982, after a year-and-a-half of diplomatic wrangling with Chinese and dubious American authorities, and the eventual intervention of former President Richard Nixon '37. Carrington waived tuition, funding Shi as a Nixon Scholar with an endowment from the President's classmates. He then arranged for Shi's living accommodations, a modified first-year curriculum, and a summer job with Nixon's New York firm, Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon. (See Carrington's essay, "Duke Law in China: A Remembrance," excerpt, page 24.)
In the fall of 1983, an undergraduate classmate of Shi's, Gao Xiqing, also was admitted with a full scholarship. Gao was already in the United States, working as an intern with Graham & James in its San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles offices. Although Gao is remembered for his initiative as a student at the Law School, he recalls his culture shock at encountering the American system.
In China, you'd show up to school, and the professor would tell you exactly what you were going to do, then give you books, pens, notebooks–everything. It never occurred to me to go to the bulletin board to see what the professor wanted us to do in advance of the class.
"My first class was property law, with [the late] Professor Bertel Sparks. I went to class empty-handed, and looked around. Everyone else had an enormous book with them. Immediately, Professor Sparks started talking about some case, speaking in legal jargon. So for the whole hour, I had no clue what was going on." Gao recalls struggling to keep up–and getting very little sleep–during his first several months of law school.
The Law School established more formal ties with China and Chinese legal institutions following a
visit in 1983 by an official from the Ministry of Education and the dean of the People's University Law School (Ren Da) in Beijing, and Carrington's first recruiting trip to China–at their
invitation–in the summer of 1984. With Ocko also conducting interviews during his regular trips, screening prospective students for their English language proficiency, the Law School found
itself with an ever-increasing number of Chinese students entering the JD program through the 1980s. A high of 15 entered in 1987.
Although the PRC paid airfare for some of these students, none of them paid tuition. Carrington instead recruited a law firm sponsor for each student; the students worked for their sponsors for two summers, with the Law School receiving sufficient funds in return to cover the students' living expenses through the year. Many firms had an alumni connection to the Law School, and viewed their sponsorships as a contribution to the public interest, Carrington explains.
It was not hard to convince American lawyers that a country having almost no lawyers badly needed some."
Judy Horowitz, associate dean for international studies, recalls some of the practical challenges involved in providing comprehensive support to a relatively large number of students "far from home, many without their spouses and children, most with little or no previous legal training, some with limited English ability, and all new to the complexities of America and American education." She recalls, for instance, the challenge property law posed for students essentially unfamiliar with the concept; one bright student, she says, managed to defer taking it until his third year.
The faculty was, by and large, supportive of Carrington's establishment of a "China program." Brainerd Currie Professor of Law James Cox, whose classes in securities law have always been particularly popular with Chinese students, was a champion from the start.
"I was genuinely excited about the prospect that we would be reaching out. This was a neat thing for Duke to do–connect itself with a real issue in the world that would have a long and lasting impact. And I think everybody understood that a country that was going to be other than just a third-world country had to have economic development, so their students would have a keen interest in learning as much as they could about commercial and corporate transactions in particular."