LEGAL EDUCATION

2008 marked the 30th anniversary of reform and opening. With the successful implementation of the reform and opening up policy, Chinese legal education has made compelling achievements that are recognized all over the world. The Chinese legal education system was based on the American and German models, but created with Chinese characteristics．

A．Chinese Higher Legal Education since Reform and Opening

Chinese legal education is composed of higher education, vocational education, and legal popularization. The system went through three stages of development.

First, from l978 to l987, the system was comprehensively rehabilitated. At this stage, a group of ambitious law students were recruited from around the country. The main features of legal education at that time were the normalization of the curriculum and the reduction of its political complexion. The Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice helped to develop various types of legal education outside the regular universities. In 1982, the first group of graduate law students enrolled, and in 1985, the first group of PH.D. law students of law began classes.

The second stage of legal education standardization lasted from 1988 to 1997. In 1997, 1aw schools and departments trained increased numbers of law professionals and the schools paid more attention to the quality of legal education.

The third stage of legal education development began in 1998. By November 2008, there were 634 1aw schools and departments throughout China, a number that has grown l05.67 times since reform and opening. About 300,000 undergraduate students are studying law, while more than 220,000 students in junior colleges are majoring in law, a 200 times increase since reform and opening. More than 60,000 graduate students study law, an increase of 260 times. Only one law student was enrolled when China began recruiting Ph.D. students in 1982. That figure increased to 1,340 in 1998 and 4,157 in 2002. 1,700 students received doctorates of law in 2008, while 2,500 were recruited and 8,500 were still in school. Finally, more than 55,000 law professors have been trained in the 30 years since reform and opening.

The Chinese legal vocational education system trains judges, public procurators, lawyers, and notaries. These students constitute the basic professions of the legal system with Chinese characteristics.

Since National Judges College was established in l997, numerous senior judges have received training; the college serves both undergraduate and junior college students. Judge training includes training to qualify as presidents and vice-presidents of intermediate and upper1evel courts continued post qualifications for senior judges in all levels of court, promotion qualifications for prospective senior judges, and training for prospective ordinary judges. After the authorization of the Supreme People' s Court, National Judges College successively established branches in the Higher People' s Courts of Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Shandong, Heilongjiang, Henan, Gansu, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Jiangsu to organize the education and training of local judges. By August 2007, National Judges College offered 260 different training classes and had trained nearly 30,000 chief justices and administrative judicial personnel, while provincial 1evel judge training organizations offered more than 2,000 different training classes and had trained more than 500,000 judges and court employees. In 2008, National Judges College established the judge training network and advanced new training methods, which symbolized a new phase of China' s judge training system.

In l998, the Supreme People' s Procuratorate established National Prosecutors College and created National Prosecutors College Branches in provincial-level procuratorates. These institutions provided multi-channel, multi-1evel, multiform training for prosecutors. The "2001-2005 National Program on Education and Training for Prosecuting Cadres"and"2006-20 l 0 National Program on Education and Training for Prosecuting Cadres," formulated by the Supreme People' s Procuratorate, standardized the prosecutor training system. In 2007, the Supreme People's Procuratorate issued the" Regulations on Prosecutor Training," providing systematic and detailed provisions about the organization, teachers, and teaching materials to establish more scientific methods of instruction.

When compared to the judge and prosecutor training systems, development of lawyer and notary training in China has lagged behind and is still in a period of gradual development.

Even before the All China Lawyers Association was established in 1986, a lawyer vocational education system was under consideration. The Lawyers Law was implemented to divide lawyer training into two groups: apprenticing lawyers and practicing lawyers. The former undergoes vocational training before holding an official post, while the latter is subject to lifelong vocational training. The"Notice on Further Normalizing Lawyer Training, " promulgated by the Ministry of justice in 1997, made concrete provisions for training practicing lawyers. The lawyer training system outlined in the provisions provided new knowledge, information, and ideas for practicing lawyers, which positively enhanced their professional skills. However, the Notice failed to disclose whether lawyer-training institutions were temporary or longtime and whether training would be conducted by a guest organization or a professional.

According to the principle of education, we should" teach students in accordance with their individual aptitudes." If we disregard reality and group students in similar classes with similar content and train them in a similar way, some will inevitably receive excessive training while others receive insufficient training. This does not conform to the basic rule of pedagogy.

In addition, when compared to judges, public prosecutors, and even police officers, the vocational education system for lawyers lacks a corresponding college. Although the Lawyers Law and its related rules and regulations have stipulated that the lawyers' association must take responsibility for providing vocational education training for lawyers, under the current situation in China, the lawyers' association cannot undertake this important task..

The goals of legal education are to popularize public knowledge of the rule of law and encourage all Chinese citizens who have the ability to receive an education to do so. These goals differ from those of higher learning institutions and legal vocational schools. During reform and opening, China carried out five different legal popularization campaigns to bolster the ruling party' s policies and thought, prompting three historical transformations: the transformation from formative education to an awareness of placing priority on leading cadres' capacities to make decisions; the transformation from a sole law provision to the omni-directional advancement of administering the country according to law; and the transformation from a deficiency in legislation to an excess of policies.

A．Lagging Management Patterns and Insufficient Regulatory Mechanisms

Since reform and opening, government functions in some educational administrations have undergone sweeping changes, giving schools the right to govern independently. However, the entire educational system did not shed the centralized management pattern of the planned economy. This contradictory phenomenon is especially obvious in legal education. Competent education departments at both national and provincial levels exercise direct control over legal education in schools by nominating school officials, recruiting students, and providing educational funds. These actions prevent schools from fulfilling their educational functions and developing independent of the government. This lagging management pattern does not meet the demands of legal educational development. The lack of unified national authorization procedures and qualification examination provisions for law schools and departments sends the system freewheeling. The creation of the Law Teaching Steering Committee by the Ministry of Education in 2001 failed to play a helpful role, as committee members were drawn from the Ministry of Education and its related institutions; members were then scattered around the country, limiting the number of centralized meetings each year. Therefore, it is difficult to provide systemic, long-term, and targeted predictions for the future development of legal education. The best we can do at present is to establish a set of normative scientific mediation and control mechanisms.

B．Market-Oriented Legal Education and Economic Interest

Reform and opening presented a rare opportunity for the legal education system. Large quantities of legal talent must be trained to fill the positions of judge, prosecutor, lawyer, and judicial administrator. In the 1990s, the higher education system underwent a major development scheme in which legal science became a popular subject. In short time, legal specialties became the first choice of numerous college entrance examinees, prompting colleges and universities to increase the number of subject offerings and expand student enrollment．Some law schools made the mistake of blindly expanding student recruitment despite a lack of corresponding course offerings. In recent years, schools of all levels and backgrounds have begun offering law courses; such disordered training harms the quality of legal education, producing lower quality graduates. In 1978, only one law school and five subordinate departments were inexistence; now 634 departments exist.

C．Disordered Organization of Legal Education

Prior to the l980s, China's legal education system was concentrated in the law departments of colleges and universities and primarily focused on undergraduate coursework. This later expanded to technical secondary schools, junior colleges, and graduate schools. Technical secondary schools formed partnerships with judicial schools at the provincial level, while junior colleges offered full-time programs, evening classes, correspondence courses, and continued study programs for adults. Graduate schools offered both Master of Law degrees and Juris Master professional certification. In the beginning, students found the organization of law departments to be too administration-oriented; standards for admission were excessively low. The disorder of the early system hurt not only professional legal figures, but also prospective law students. Some colleges and universities created law departments without qualified teachers or ideal teaching conditions, which badly influenced the training quality of legal talent. The proportion of teachers to students was unbalanced, books and reference materials insufficient, learning environment and living conditions poor, and the contradiction between the scale and quality of legal education more conspicuous each day. Those individuals who wished to study law had to first pass a multitude of enrollment standards. This only increased the difficulty of receiving a quality education.

D．Quality of Law Professors and Flow of Personnel

Studying jurisprudence and rule of law construction is a new phenomenon in China; knowledge of these fields is still very limited. In contrast, knowledge of China's legal domain as a whole is actually quite diversified. However, excessively refined knowledge of subjects occasionally creates a barrier between law teachers and scientific research. Teachers and researchers often engage in one specialized subject and neglect others. This mindset was advantageous during the initial building stages of the rule of law, but the pattern quickly became a bottleneck restricting legal development in China. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of law teachers have good theoretical knowledge, but know little about actual legal practices. They tend to stress abstract theories, but do not pay great attention to concrete operations and stress overseas theories and systems of law, but do not understand the problems within China. With the development of vocational education, the deficiencies of many law school teachers have been exposed.

Meanwhile, at present, there is an unfettered flow of teachers between various universities and scientific research institutions. This occurs when instructors are earning a master's or doctorate degree and are paid higher elsewhere or have the opportunity to be mentored by a famous professor. This makes legal teaching structures seriously unreasonable. To meet basic teaching requirements, inferior schools and departments may hire young teachers who lack teaching experience. At the same time, the inexperienced teachers are unable to manage the excessive workload of the initial several years, making it difficult for them to improve their teaching and research abilities. If they feel their efforts and earned benefits are out of proportion, these young teachers may seek other employment, creating another void in the educational structure.

E. Performance-Price Ratio

With the unprecedented expansion of the legal education system, the quality of legal graduates has, surprisingly enough, aroused suspicion and criticism." People earning law degrees are so numerous that legal diplomas are as inexpensive as muck." In addition, it has become more difficult for law school graduates to obtain employment. According to statistics, the employment rate for law graduates was actually last on a list of liberal arts majors reported in 2007. Although some undergraduate law students from Peking University and Nankai University secured employment as clerks in grassroots level courts, there are far too many college graduates for the small number of available jobs.

Nearly all undergraduate colleges and universities choose the legal subjects to be studied and allow unaccredited law courses to spring up all over, creating sharp increases in the number of enrolled law students and a shortage of quality teaching resources. Unfortunately, monitoring and control over the quality of higher education course offerings is being implemented at a slow pace. Current monitoring procedures are manifested in random teaching inspections organized by governmental units, which impedes the improvement of teaching and broadcasts the fact that colleges and universities lack intrinsic self-restraint mechanisms to normalize the legal education system. The only way to resolve this issue is to cultivate a more pressing social need for high-quality legal talent rather than for multitudes of inexperienced lawyers.

In the 60 years since New China was founded, construction of the rule of law has passed through two important stages. Stage I lasted nearly 30 years between 1949 and 1978; the management of state affairs and settlement of social disputes were done in accordance with the policies of the ruling party. Stage II has lasted another 30 years between 1978 and the present. Chinese legislation experienced four development phases during Stage II: comprehensive rehabilitation and development(1978-1982), the planned market economy(1982-1992), the socialist market economic system(1993-2002), and scientific development (2003-present day). A socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics has been completed, basic laws and supporting regulations have been formulated, and each aspect of the economy, political system, culture, and social life has corresponding laws to follow.1 Over the past several years, the legal education system has gradually shifted from being knowledge-oriented to vocation oriented.

The past 30 years of development since reform and opening has reached a new intersection, but the road to follow is not always clearly marked. While some paths are fully exposed, others are still undiscovered.2 The legal education system has hesitated in this intersection for several years and the time to choose is now. All governors, pedagogues, and students of legal education have the obligation to earnestly study the scientific rule of legal education, consider the present situation of the local Chinese condition, and diligently choose a bright road for the next step of legal education development in China.

The next 30 years will be a true test of the rule of law. Legal education highlights the characteristics of this transformation. In the future, we should emphatically readjust the functional localization of Chinese legal education; create roles for the government, legal educational institutions, and society to play; continually asses the quality of law schools and departments; optimize the teaching structure and improve legal educational methods; encourage benign interaction between legal education, the judicial exam and legal practice; and place the socialist idea of rule of 1aw and citizen consciousness at the core of further development.

The next 30 years will also be a crucial test of China's hybrid socialist market economy. The omnipresent goal of building a harmonious society may be accomplished by implementing a democratic society, socialist market economy, and socialist democratic political system. These goals indicate that China is realizing the importance of rule of law. Subsequently, we must further study legal science and jurisprudence to promote legal education innovations. This is a time of reform, innovation, and development; it is not a time to go backwards. In this sense, China's legal education system is responsible for both the present and the future, and for the benefit of both China and the world.

Notes:

1 Scholars believe that the socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics was based on the Chinese Constitution. The system is comprised of seven components: civil and commercial laws, administrative laws, economic laws, social laws, criminal laws, procedural and non-procedural laws, and local laws and regulations. At present, China has 229 laws, 600 administrative policies, and more than 7,000 local laws and regulations.Li Lin李林. Legislative Development in China since Reform and Opening 30 Years Ago . Zhongguo faxue wang中国法学网www.iolaw.org.cn (accessed on August 28, 2008).

2Xu Xianming 徐显明. "Strengthening the Construction of Specialized Subjects, Improving the Quality of Legal Education(Seminar Closing Ceremony Speech)."Zhongguo faxue jiaoyu yanjiu中国法学教育研究 China Legal Education and Research 3(2006): 3.