Duke Law in China: David Warren '64
Professor Emeritus, Occupational and Environmental Medicine: Duke University
Warren is an expert in public health and environmental law. He first went to China in 1998 as a Fulbright Academic Scholar, teaching environmental law at Tsinghua University Law School, and returned there in 1999 to help set up Duke Law School's reciprocal arrangement with Tsinghua. Warren returned again in 2001 to facilitate an experiment in distance learning with Tsinghua's law school.
When I was at Tsinghua my main job was teaching environmental law and being a promoter of other activities at the law school. I became involved with moot court, and edited the inaugural issue of the law journal.
Tsinghua was primarily an engineering and science university, and just reopened its law school with a graduate-level law degree in 1995. The first class of seven students graduated when I was there. I was teaching the second-year students, a class of 14.
While their English was quite good, the Socratic method of teaching came as quite a jolt to my students. While the students were accustomed to recitation and memorization, I was trying to teach them to process, to analyze, and to think on their feet. They had not been exposed to any western-style teaching up to that point. I introduced the idea of standing, coming to the board, role-playing, taking one position and switching sides, and taking the other side and making the same argument. Some of my students complained about it early on, but by the end of the semester, the head of the “anti-Socratic camp” became a real proponent. In fact, she became my assistant when I returned in 1999.
By 2001, things had changed had changed drastically. The student body numbered 600 — up from a total of 20 in 1998. They had a new building, a much larger faculty, and a steady stream of foreign professors, Fulbright scholars and others. Tsinghua had made remarkable progress, far beyond what an American law school could achieve over just three years.
I got a sense that a certain portion of the students wanted to use their law degrees for the idealistic purposes of being part of the “rule of law” movement, and others were interested in being involved with business and making a lot of money.
In my areas of expertise, environmental law and public health, I see considerable progress. There are more academic environmental studies, an increasing public interest and awareness, and more government money being put toward environmental protection. And while routine, public health maintenance surveillance remains under-funded and under-manned, there is a public health infrastructure in place now. China's reponse to SARS showed that it can mount a massive public health response to contain a serious epidemic.