Duke Law in China: Paul D. Carrington
By Paul D. Carrington
Paul Carrington, Dean from 1978 to 1988, oversaw the start of the Duke Law School's Involvement with China
Icame from Michigan to Duke in 1978 to serve as dean of the Law School. I had in mind the opportunity to help improve legal education in the United States. Not considered was the possible internationalization of the Duke Law School, or that Duke might play a role in legal education in China.
It was perhaps in December [1980] that I received a stunning letter from Shi Xi-min, then in China. To get a letter from China was itself an astounding event. No one born after 1960 can today imagine the degree of isolation of China, especially in its disconnection from America. Xi-min wanted to study law in the United States. The quality of his English was such that I was confident some American had written his letter, and he did acknowledge the help of a graduate of Wellesley College. He identified himself as a worker with the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade, and a recent graduate of the University of International Business and Economics. But he also described his life as the son of an air force general who had himself served in the military as a helicopter pilot. And he had also been in prison twice during the Cultural Revolution–once as his father's son, and once on his own account. He was married to a woman who was on military duty in Tibet. All this was interesting, but what blew my mind was his claim to have translated into Mandarin two novels by William Faulkner, one of which ( Absalom, Absalom ) I had read and found to be absolutely incomprehensible. I much desired to meet such a person.
It was not until the early spring of 1982 that Xi-min actually arrived in Durham. Getting him out of China was not easy. There was the U.S. Department of State to deal with. And then its Chinese counterpart. A call to our alumnus, former President Richard Nixon '37, did get the attention of the Chinese bureaucracy. Another alumnus, Al Philipp '50, general counsel to Pan-American Airways, then the largest international airline, arranged for Xi-min to get a free ride from Beijing to New York. The Law School bought him a ticket to RDU. Because we had a small endowment fund contributed by President Nixon's classmates, I designated Xi-min as the Nixon Scholar and used the bit of income from that fund to cover some of his costs.
Because Xi-min had never studied law in China, it was from the first planned that he would stay three years and do the JD program, with a lighter load in the first year. I was able in effect to waive tuition. Given the rate of international exchange at that time (the annual income of a Chinese worker might then exchange for perhaps $200), it was unimaginable that tuition would ever be paid by a student from China. Less easily solved was the problem of living expenses. I arranged for Xi-min to live [in a rooming house owned by my son]. He was a strong personality and an adequate student of American law. He found employment for himself for the summer of 1983 (with some help from Professor George Christie) at Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon in New York, the firm in which Richard Nixon had practiced in the 1960s.
From the first, Xi-min was ambitious to bring other students from China. He most urgently recommended his friend Gao Xiqing, who had been his fellow student at the University of International Business and Economics. Somehow, Xiqing had landed a tour as a paralegal at Graham & James in Los Angeles. The most striking fact about him was that his father had been on the Long March of 1933, when the Communist force led by Mao Tse-tung escaped the trap set by the Kuomintang army led by Chiang Kai-shek. His English was very good, and he struck me as rather a Chinese patriot. So I admitted him as a second student from China, but wondering how we would cover his living expenses.
Also that summer, Xi-min was recruited by the Chinese Embassy in Washington to study New York law firms as possible counsel to the Embassy. The Embassy badly needed help, and the foreign exchange rates disabled them from contemplating the help they needed — the price of legal services was to them simply prohibitive. For example, sometime in 1982 someone had moved to reopen an ancient judgment against the Kingdom of China that had been entered by an Alabama court many decades earlier. The Embassy's way of dealing with it was to insist that the United States Department of State should fix the matter. The result was a default leading to prolonged difficulty. On behalf of the Embassy, Xi-min talked to a lot of New York lawyers and recommended to the Embassy the names of three, for which they expressed gratitude.
But in the fall of 1983, Xi-min received an urgent call from the Embassy. Someone had initiated a proceeding in the United States Department of Commerce to impose a countervailing duty on Chinese textiles. Billions were at stake. But no one on Xi-min's list would do. The list being useless, Xi-min and Xiqing would have to take care of the matter! No one in our law school knew much about countervailing duties, but we knew a few lawyers in Washington who did. So they got some pro bono help in writing a memo to be filed by the Embassy. It was not likely a hard case to win, given the international political scene at the moment. But China won, and the Embassy was grateful to the Duke Law School for its cost-free victory.
A few weeks later, I received a visit from Wang Fusun of the Ministry of Education and Dean Gao of the People's University Law School (Ren Da). They invited me to come to China in the summer of 1984 as a guest of the People's Republic to recruit more students who might be able to win such cases after a few months at Duke.
I was in China for over two weeks, accompanied by [my wife] Bessie and our younger son, Will. We ... were taken to the universities to meet Anglophonic faculty and the students whom they recommended for places at Duke.
At Ren Da, I met 10 law teachers and five law students who wanted to come to Duke. I provided the students with a copy of the opinion of the [Supreme] Court in Hickman v. Taylor , and then later got them to discuss it with me. I was satisfied that all were competent in English.
An interpreter was needed for my visit with the faculty. The faculty did not have offices, but carrels in a library that had been thoroughly cleansed of capitalist dogma during the Cultural Revolution. Their university was established in a cave in 1934 and its historic role was to train party leaders, and for that reason it had survived the Cultural Revolution. But in 1984 it was an arm of the Education Ministry and its students were selected by a national examination. They proposed to employ Shi Xi-min as a member of their faculty. It seemed to be supposed that I could arrange that.
Ren Da had never had foreign students, and one aim of our discussion was to consider what they might do with Duke Law students. They would provide room, board, and instruction to Duke students in exchange for our working with their students. I agreed to take two in 1984, and perhaps the other three in 1985. In exchange, three of our alumni did later spend an academic year there. For Ross Katchman '87 and Dan Scheinman '87, that experience proved to be very important to their future careers.
In 1985, the Council on Legal Education Exchange with China was organized and funded by the Luce Foundation. My presence as a member of the five-member Council was an acknowledgment that Duke was for the moment ahead in building a relationship with China. Other law schools were also, like Duke, beginning to see the prospect of becoming international institutions and it was the role of CLEEC to connect them to Chinese applicants.
I succeeded in recruiting a law firm sponsor for each of the JD students Duke enrolled. The students worked for two summers in those firms and were paid enough to cover modest living expenses.
In varying degrees, these law firms may have hoped to secure future business, but in large measure, these were law firm contributions to the public interest.
It was not hard to convince American lawyers that a country having almost no lawyers badly needed some.
More than a few lawyers with whom I spoke thought perhaps China might be offered some of our excess
legal manpower. I also got a little financial support from foundations and corporations. Sometime in the late 1980s, I noticed that we had five Koreans among our international students. I took them
to lunch one day to find out how we were enjoying such success in attracting Koreans. The answer I was given was that it was not easy for a Korean to establish contact with anyone from the People's
Republic. The best place in the world to do that, they thought, was Durham, North Carolina.
Also available is Paul Carrington's full essay,
"Duke Law in China: A Remembrance."