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144 Lü: A university’s academic atmosphere often has a huge influence on its students. You served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University for some time and experienced typical American or Anglo-American legal education, so I think you are well positioned to give us an informative introduction to Anglo-American legal education, like that offered by the Law School of Harvard University, as related to curriculum, sources of students, campus study, teaching methods, career directions of graduates, and so forth. He: I did not stay there for long—only seven months—though, of course, I did get an impression of the legal education there. By the way, the term Anglo-American legal education is not quite appropriate because there are major differences between the United States and Great Britain in their legal education systems. An important characteristic of Western legal education is that it exists in rule-of-law societies, an environment that inevitably drives the development of legal education. After my return from Harvard, I was asked to give a presentation on my Harvard tour to my colleagues at the Law School of Peking University. The university is striving to develop into a world-class university, and a world-class university must have a world-class legal school. So what does it take to become a world-class law school? I was asked to share my Harvard experience with an eye to these issues. An important chapter seven Foreign Models and Chinese Practice in Legal Education during the Reform Era Editor’s note: The original Chinese version of this chapter was based on the author’s interview with Lü Yaping, an editor of the Beijing University Press, in 2006 and first appeared in Zhongguo faxue jiaoyu yanjiu [Studies of China’s legal education], no. 1 (2006). This chapter omits portions of the interview. 08-2290-9 ch07_Yu 10/22/12 10:33 AM Page 144 foreign models and chinese practice in legal education 145 point is that a top legal school can only be established in a country with a strong legal and regulatory system. Few of us know what the legal education of Nepal or Tanzania is like, but most of us know one thing or two about the legal education of the United States, specifically, that it is offered by such universities as Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Stanford. This is so because America is the number one power in the world. So utilitarianism is also at work in the borrowing of culture—it is taken for granted that a strong country must have a strong culture. Of course, American legal education does have much to recommend itself, and the legal education offered by Harvard or Yale is indeed first rate. I think American legal education is a continuation of the traditional practice of the University of Bologna in Italy, where law is studied as a profession at the postgraduate level. This kind of framework is uncommon worldwide and has multiple benefits. First, legal education is exclusively dedicated to legal subjects—humanities education already has been completed in the undergraduate stage—with the definite objective of training legal professionals and experts, and in the three-year study, the students are only concerned with acquiring a comprehensive and systematic knowledge of the law. The second benefit is the convergence of students with different academic backgrounds in the law school and the opportunity to see legal issues from different perspectives because graduates in whatever disciplines, however bizarre they are, can apply to law school. As we know, law is not a self-sufficient discipline, and its development has always been subject to input from other fields of knowledge. If there were not the legal thoughts contributed by Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, Roman law would not have been so comprehensive and advanced. Romans benefited greatly from Greek philosophy, especially some abstract and natural law concepts. Enlightenment thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu also played an important role in shaping the modern legal system, and their contributions to law are arguably even greater than those made by major jurists. In a word, American legal education is a melting pot of different kinds of expertise that serves to boost the development of legal education and legal research. I believe that it is no coincidence that for the major part of the last century, America held a leading position in the world in legal research, and this, I think, is closely related to its unique legal education system. The legal...

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