This collection of essays celebrates Professor Jerome A. Cohen’s ground-breaking role in American scholarship on Chinese law.Authored by Professor Cohen’s former students and academic associates, the articles cover important topics in Chinese legal studies, ranging from ancient legal history to the contemporary legal process.
Widely recognized as the foremost American authority on Chinese law, Professor Cohen started his adult life in a way that presaged anything but a career in Chinese legal studies.A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College (B.A. in Political Science, 1951), Professor Cohen went on to Yale Law School in 1952 after spending the 1951-52 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar in France.He distinguished himself at Yale Law School, serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Law Journal and graduating first in his class in 1955.After then clerking at the Unites States Supreme Court for both Chief Justice Earl Warren (in 1955) and Justice Felix Frankfurter (in 1956), Professor Cohen was on the ideal path to becoming a public law professor at a major U.S. law school.
And that was exactly what he had in mind.After spending one year practicing law at a large, private law firm and another as an Assistant U.S. Attorney and a consultant to the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Professor Cohen entered academia in 1959.A promising young professor at the University of California School of Law at Berkeley, Professor Cohen set out to teach administrative law.Little did he suspect that, although he had never been associated -- even remotely -- with China, China and its legal process was soon to become the focus of his career for over four decades up until the present day.
Just at that time, the Rockefeller Foundation was urgently seeking someone to study the law of the People’s Republic of China, something no Western lawyer had ever undertaken.Recognizing the potential importance of U.S.-China relations and, more important, the challenge of such a unique and exciting opportunity, Professor Cohen decided to accept the Foundation’s invitation.In 1960, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Professor Cohen began to study the Chinese language and embarked on what many believed to be an ill-advised endeavor to grasp the intricacies of Chinese law.What no one foresaw at the time was how generations of lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom Professor Cohen was to teach personally, would follow in his bold footsteps.
Tackling his research task with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, Professor Cohen quickly established himself as the leading expert on Chinese law in the Western world.His first major breakthrough came in the form of a one-year fieldwork stint in Hong Kong between 1963 and 1964, where he interviewed refugees from mainland China and researched other materials in an effort to map out the legal system of a closed-off country.Published by Harvard University Press in 1968 as The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1963: An Introduction, the results of that study represent a major, path-breaking achievement in American scholarship on Chinese law.
In the meantime, Professor Cohen had moved to become a faculty member at Harvard Law School, where he stayed for twenty-five years from 1964 to 1989, serving as its Associate Dean between 1975 and 1978.The presence of Professor Cohen at Harvard Law School, as well as the East Asian Legal Studies program (EALS) he founded there in 1965 and directed until 1981, made Harvard Law School the Mecca of Chinese legal studies in the Western hemisphere.That the contributors to this volume, all major scholars of Chinese law, have all been -- in one way or another -- associated with Harvard Law School and/or EALS is strong testimony to Professor Cohen’s unparalleled impact on Chinese legal studies in the United States and beyond.
The field of Chinese legal studies saw a tremendous development in the late 1970s when, under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, China decided to adopt the
【出处】
纽约:纽约大学出版社(New York University Press)
【写作年份】2002
【学科类别】法学理论->法理学 |