Abstract
Legal Education in Asia. Edited by Shuvro Prosun Sarker, Eleven International Publishing, The Hague, 2014. Pp. 298, 75 Euro.
Legal Education in Asia 1 features writings by legal educators about the legal educational systems of 13 Asian countries, each reflecting a unique character and history. The countries are Bangladesh, China with a separate chapter on Hong Kong, India, Iran, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and Vietnam. The book showcases the diversity in the legal profession country to country as well as within legal education, involving many variables such as language, duration of study, curriculum approval mechanisms, law faculty eligibility, law practice limitations on law faculty, grading of student performance, national bar examinations and post-law degree practical training.
The book tantalizes the reader with insights about the effects of history and political change on the legal profession, as authors discuss the forms of government (including democracies, kingdoms, republics, socialist states and a Special Administrative Region) that pertain to their jurisdictions. Moments in history shared by the chapter authors illuminate cross-cultural influences in development of national legal systems. For example, the reader learns that codification of laws in Iran was influenced not only by Islamic law and French codes, but also by US advisors on the drafting of new army laws. 2 Moreover, Jewish law professors fleeing the Holocaust took shelter in Turkey and were enlisted in drafting changes to the Turkish legal system. 3
Yet, from the critiques of the highly diverse legal educational systems emerge several common views: legal education is often overly theoretical, law faculty generally lack law practice experience and incentives for interactive teaching, and legal education and the legal system as a whole address problems of only certain segments of the population. Most law graduates emerge from a passive learning environment without the preparation to meet the needs of their society, particularly to provide access to justice to everyone in multicultural societies and to prepare graduates to be competitive in addressing legal issues flowing from globalization. Mechanisms for change in law teacher education are needed along with development of law school teaching materials that promote interactive learning. Assessment of student performance on a regular basis would engage students more deeply in the learning process.
The book, comprising a collegial sharing by the 30 authors 4 of the contexts of the law teaching profession and concerns about the academic and moral preparation of law graduates, does not take on a comparative law agenda in a technical sense, but in fact, presents a robust cross-section of legal systems—primarily civil law systems, Muslim law systems, customary law systems and mixed systems. Common law systems existing in former Commonwealth countries (present in varying degrees in mixed systems in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Hong Kong) are in the minority. For a graphic illustration of this legal system diversity, one can view the legal system map 5 created by the University of Ottawa World Legal Systems Research Group, Juriglobe. 6
Clinical legal education, involving active student participation in application of law to real-life problems and practice of legal skills either through simulation or through assistance to low-income or otherwise marginalized clients, is a theme in the book. It is pedagogy that many of the book’s authors value and is indeed a global movement. 7 Clinical legal education took root in the common law/mixed jurisdiction of the United States of America in the 1960s and spread throughout US law schools. India was among other countries to begin establishing clinical programmes around the same time. Law schools in almost all of the countries included in this book currently engage in some form of clinical legal education. The method focuses on student learning by doing; law faculty support learning by exposing students to client situations and by coaching students on preparation, performance and reflection on application of law, practical skills and the ethical dimensions of the roles of lawyers and clients.
The book’s authors manifest eagerness for sharing, understanding and cooperation among legal educators interested in legal educational reform to develop law graduates to be responsive to societal needs. To reach such authors, the editor knocked the growing network of the Global Alliance for Justice Education (GAJE), 8 which includes within its mission statement that ‘Clinical education of law students is a key component of justice education, but this organization also works to advance other forms of socially relevant legal education, which includes education of practicing lawyers, judges, non-governmental organizations and the lay public’. 9
Indeed, the Foreword of the book paints a vision of legal education reform. In it, eminent Indian jurist and legal educational institution-builder Dr N.R. Madhava Menon observes that legal education should be redesigned to realize constitutional goals such as ‘justice—social, economic and political—assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the nation’. 10 Dr Menon advocates comparative scholarship and imagines an Asian confederation of law schools to contribute to ‘peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation for trade and development of the two thirds of humanity inhabiting the Asian countries’. 11
Reform is difficult to achieve, and authors of chapters on Taiwan, Japan and Korea, in particular, examine bold reform efforts that have faltered and the learning that is emerging from them. In Taiwan, for example, after an initial reform failure, progress came when ‘[a]n innovative legal pedagogy project between 2006 and 2011 …attracted more than 100 scholars to design innovative teaching material, and more than fifty case books were produced’. 12 In Japan, a new law school system designed to increase the number of lawyers, and therefore access to justice, is under review after the law graduates’ pass rate on the national bar examination was lower than expected, apparently causing law school applications to decline. 13 South Korea’s change to a US-style three-year graduate school system faces concerns about ‘cost, unemployment and status issues’. 14
From across the globe, Legal Education in Asia will attract readers interested in international collaboration on legal education and the legal profession, in comparative legal systems and in professional efforts to increase access to justice. An intriguing issue is the possible development of shared indicators of progress in legal education. From the chapter on Turkey, the reader glimpses the reform potential of regional norms such as the Sorbonne-Bologna Process and the 2007 Recommendations of Council of Bar and Law Societies of Europe (CCBE) on the Training Outcomes for European Lawyers on expected knowledge, skills and competencies. 15 The CCBE recommendations are framed in three sections: Who lawyers are? What lawyers do? How lawyers should work? 16
These are three key questions for all legal education reformers with a goal of social justice. Beyond the scope of the CCBE document, these questions invite broad reflection on legal education and the profession:
Who are lawyers? Are members of the bar representative of the diversity within society? What lawyers do? Does legal education prepare lawyers to serve the broad range of societal legal needs, beyond court representation and transactional practice? How should lawyers work? Do all sectors of society have meaningful access to justice? Are ethical norms followed and enforced?
Legal Education in Asia contributes to dialogue and invites further study of the topic. 17 For a sequel to this book, it would be pertinent to explicitly ask progressive legal educators such as these authors about cooperation among law faculty and law schools, as Dr Menon imagines in his Foreword. What are strategies for equipping law teachers to reform pedagogy? What teacher training resource materials exist and can be developed? What strategies can be used to train law students and lawyers to provide access to justice and to help poor and marginalized communities address legal issues encountered at the grassroots? What support and incentives should there be for legal research generally and for research on legal education reform?