Past Events

DOCTOR OF JURIDICAL SCIENCE PROGRAM

In Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

DOCTOR OF JURIDICAL SCIENCE

(S.J.D.)

PROFESSOR XIANGSHUN DING

will defend his dissertation titled

Raising the Bar through Reforming Legal Education:
A Comparative Study on the Reforms of Legal Education in Northeast Asia

Defense Committee:

LLOYD T. WILSON, JR.
Committee Chair
Professor of Law
Indiana University McKinney School of Law

ANDREW R. KLEIN
Dean and Paul E. Beam Professor of Law
Indiana University McKinney School of Law

JUDITH A. MCMORROW
Professor of Law
Associate Dean for Experiential Learning
& Global Engagement
Boston College Law School, Designated Expert
            
MARY SUE BACKUS
Hugh Roff Professor of Law
Robert Glenn Rapp Foundation Presidential Professor
University of Oklahoma College of Law, Designated Expert

Date: Friday, 29 March 2019
Time: 1:00-3:00 pm
Venue:  Faculty Lounge, Room 351
 Faculty, staff, students, and members of the public are all welcome.
Refreshments will be available.
 
ABSTRACT
 Raising the Bar through Reforming Legal Education:
A Comparative Study on the Reforms of Legal Education in Northeast Asia

There are several common features in terms of legal culture, legal profession, and legal education in East Asia, especially in China, Japan, and South Korea. All three countries have been affected by traditional Chinese Confucius legal culture before the western powers invaded East Asia in the middle of the 19th century. There were no formal legal education systems or modern legal profession in the ancient period in these countries. Since the 1860s, continental law, rather than common law, has made an impact on the formation of modern Japanese law, Chinese law, as well as Korean law.  As the result of the adoption of a new legal system, institutional legal professions also emerged, and with them a new system of teaching legal knowledge and skills within liberal arts education was shaped in the three countries since the end of 20th century.    

Traditionally, legal knowledge is taught to undergraduate and graduate students rather than providing professional skills education, and there is no institutional connection between legal education and the legal profession. But since the end of the 20th century, influenced by the American professional education model and motivated by the demand for cultivating high-level legal talents in the development of a global market economy, legal education in the three countries started to change fundamentally, both institutionally and pedagogically.

In 1995, China introduced several elements from American professional legal education and set up a new Juris Master program at the graduate study level. Japan also established a new professional legal education system in 2004, (Houkadaigakuin in Japanese), modeled after the American law school approach and soon thereafter followed the implementation of the new bar examination system. In March 2009, South Korea began a legal education and bar system resembling Japan’s system. The emerging reform of professional legal education in East Asian countries is dramatically significant because legal education institutes started to be involved in the process of educating legal professionals, in the way of selecting junior legal professionals, and in the structure of bar, which has been reformed gradually. During the transition from a legal knowledge-oriented model to a professional-oriented model, many elements of American professional legal education have been introduced institutionally and pedagogically.

Based on a description and analysis of the effectiveness of different approaches to legal education reform in the three countries, this dissertation makes a systematic appraisal of the impact of legal education reforms, including on the rule of law, on the legal profession, and on the bar examination in the three countries. This dissertation also explores the possibilities and experiences relating to transplanting a professional legal education model from America to the three countries which have been influenced by the civil law tradition.

This dissertation concludes that the acceptance of professional legal education in China, Japan, and South Korea has proved that it is possible for the American model of training future lawyers by universities to be adopted in East Asia, although the effectiveness is quite subject to different institutional arrangements and allocation of resources, including human resource. Although there is certain to be turbulence ahead, the legal education reforms toward to training high-level legal talents in the three countries will continue to develop. Therefore, an in-depth and comprehensive comparative study of the current legal education reforms in China, Japan, and South Korea is significant and demanded.
BIO
Xiangshun Ding is Professor of Law at Renmin University of China Law School and also serves as Deputy Chair of the China Comparative Law Society.

Ding received his legal education in China, Japan, and the US before starting the S.J.D. program. Ding’s first language is Mandarin, but he is also fluent in English and Japanese. Ding obtained Bachelor and Master Degrees in law from Jilin University in 1992 and 1994, respectively, and a Ph.D. Degree in law from Renmin University of China Law School in 2000. He also earned a Master Degree (LL.M.) from Indiana University McKinney School of Law before he entered the S.J.D. program. Ding has been a visiting scholar at prestigious law schools in Japan and America, including Waseda University and Ritsumeikan University in Japan and at Harvard Law School, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.

Ding’s teaching career started in 1995 at Jilin University Law School immediately after graduation from his Master Degree Program and has continued at Renmin University of China Law School since 2000. Ding’s teaching at Renmin University includes courses on Comparative Law, Comparative Study on Foreign Legal Systems, East Asian Legal Studies (in English), and Introduction to Chinese Law (in English). He has also taught Chinese Law and Comparative Law in East Asia as visiting professor at Meiji University, Portuguese Catholic University Law School, University of Geneva Faculty of Law, Indiana University McKinney School of Law, and Nagoya University.

Ding has published numerous academic articles relating to comparative studies on legal education reform and on judicial reform in China, Japan, and the United States, and he has gained a reputation as an emerging comparative legal scholar. He will defend his S.J.D. dissertation titled Raising the Bar through Reforming Legal Education: A Comparative Study on the Reforms of Legal Education in Northeast Asian Countries.

Contact:

PROFESSOR KAREN E. BRAVO

Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and International Affairs

Tel. # 317-278-9117; Email:  kbravo@iu.edu