China and the Globalization of Legal Education

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the potentially profound impact on global legal education of Peking University’s experimental law school, the School of Transnational Law (“STL”), in Shenzhen, China. The closest Mainland neighbor of Hong Kong, Shenzhen was China’s first “Special Economic Zone.” Its rapid economic transformation (1980–2020) from agriculture and manufacturing into perhaps the world’s leading center of technological innovation has been remarkable, largely without the support of a pre-existing legal infrastructure (i.e., published laws with a well-developed legal profession, judiciary and public administration). Hong Kong, one of the world’s leading centers of sophisticated financial services, in contrast, achieved its economic power with the support of a well-developed common law legal system and infrastructure established during British rule. Today, Shenzhen and Hong Kong are principal China gateways to the global north and south and part of China’s Greater Bay Area, the nine cities of the Pearl River Delta that constitute the world’s most populous single metropolitan area, interconnected by advanced systems of communications, transportation and energy that portend an integrated economy competitive with any in the world. The consensus among China leadership is that the Greater Bay Area’s sustained economic development and international engagements depend on a fully developed legal infrastructure capable of serving the advanced economy and multiple legal and commercial systems and traditions characteristic of the region. It is the mission of Peking University’s School of Transnational Law to develop a program of legal education designed to produce a legal profession capable of providing these services. STL is changing the nature and purpose of Chinese legal education in the process.