This 4-storey small white building at No. 146 Kunshan Road in Shanghai is square and square, hidden in the streets and alleys of shijing. In addition to attaching to the three-story arch pillars on the front wall, some traces of the influence of the Western trend can also be captured, and there is nothing special about the whole small building.
Ordinary small buildings have an unusual past - in and out of the place was once a group of China's most proficient in common law, the best at comparative law studies, xiaolou is known as "South China's first and most famous law school" Soochow University Law School was located - graduates who went out from here have been associated with major modern historical events in China, and have had an important impact on both the region and the country.
A law school that should be born from time to time
On September 3, 1915, Charles W. Rankin, who was in charge of the attached middle school of Soochow University (opened in 1901 and was the first modern higher education school in Chinese history to be established with a Western-style school system), founded the "Soochow Law College" on the premises of the middle school, and enrolled students in the form of night schools to impart legal knowledge. Rankin, a lawyer and missionary in Tennessee, founded Soochow Law for "the significance of the legal profession to the human past" and "China's urgent need for lawyers and leaders." To be precise, in the industrial and commercial center of Shanghai, Rankin saw all the resources needed for the success of a law school, and Soochow Law School was born to smell the market opportunity.
Let's take a look at Shanghai at that time. After the opening of the port in 1843, the Shanghai Concession was lined with Chinese and foreign miscellaneous places, "industry and commerce flourished, and prison lawsuits were many." At that time, China had not yet formed its own commercial law, and Shanghai's business was completely controlled by the British and American business circles, and the most important commercial law on which it relied was "Anglo-American". With extraterritorial jurisdiction (also known as consular jurisdiction), 13 countries, including britain and the United States, have successively set up consular courts in the Shanghai public concession, and britain and the United States have also set up courts in China. In such a mixed judicial field, foreign lawyers who are familiar with foreign law and Chinese law are very popular, and even in short supply. Therefore, for Shanghai, it needs a law school with a global vision, and it also needs local legal talents.
Shanghai, which is in a special historical environment, has provided potential faculty for Soochow Law School, and Rankin has invited a group of foreign lawyers and judges stationed in Shanghai to teach part-time classes for students. When the day's work is over, the teaching work of the night school begins, and these part-time teachers pay low or even teach for free, bringing the most systematic American legal education to the school. Rankin's idea was echoed by charles S. Lobingier, then a judge of the U.S. Court in China, an expert in comparative and Roman law who was an active promoter of establishing law schools in China, who believed that "foreign legal systems should first be taught to young Chinese people so that they can choose materials from them to build their new legal systems in the future." The name The Comparative Law School of China was also his proposal, and the name of the Chinese of Soochow University Law School changed later, but the English name has been known throughout and is well known overseas. W.W. Blume, the provost after Rankin, also said: "The first and most basic problem facing Chinese law schools is how to provide students with a 'legal education adapted to the needs of this country.'" "Soochow Law School's response is to teach comparative law. At that time, Shanghai had many legal institutions, such as Fudan, Aurora, Bactria and China Public School. Soochow Law Branch is characterized by its Americanized background and its way of running schools. The group of American lawyers in China, including Luo Bingji, Fei Xinwei, Younigan, and Liu Bomu, who are practicing in Shanghai, are all American professional legal scholars who have an interest in cultivating legal talents, which not only injects the innate genes of the anallic law teaching model into the "Eastern Wu Law Branch", but also develops the important school-running characteristics of comparative law teaching in order to adapt to the actual conditions for running schools in China. The factor of americanized school background was magnified with the United States' leadership in world legal intelligence after World War II, which in turn promoted the status and influence of Soochow jurisprudence.
The old appearance of Soochow Law School
One by one, the names and stories written into history
At soochow University Law School, which is well-known in the field of education, in addition to those who study related fields and the descendants of their students, I am afraid that they are now unfamiliar to many people's ears.
List the people and historical events that bear the label "Soochow Law School". Among the famous "Eight Lawyers of the Ministry of Works" in the famous Shanghai Public Concession, 7 are graduates of Soochow Law School. Wu Jingxiong and Sheng Zhen were both Students of Eastern Wu and later became school administrators, and together they participated in the drafting of the civil, criminal, and commercial codes that constituted the main body of the "Six Laws of the Republic of China", and Wu Jingxiong was also appointed vice chairman of the Constitution Drafting Committee, and his publication of the "First Draft of the Draft Constitution of wu Jingxiong" was once controversial and became the blueprint for the 1936 Fifth Five-Year Charter. Some scholars say that in the 1920s and 1930s, soochow law graduates "played a prominent role in the legal profession and in the lives of the people, and almost any influential figure in Shanghai's legal circles was once associated with the law school."
In the mid-1940s, The Hague International Law selected 50 outstanding jurists from around the world, and Wang Peihui and Yang Zhaolong were selected in China, both professors at Soochow Law School.
From the 1930s to the 1990s, there were six Chinese judges in the International Court of Justice, starting with Gu Weijun and continuing to judge Li Haopei of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in 1997, all of whom were professors or graduates of Soochow Law School.
Among the events related to Soochow Law School, what is most remembered by the Chinese people is their contribution to the Tokyo Trial. Between 1946 and 1948, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was established by the allies, was attended by 17 Chinese people, including chief procurator Xiang Zhetao, chief procurator Ni Zhengyi, assistant procurator Qiu Shaoheng, procurator adviserSon Esen and Gui Yu, judge secretaries Fang Fushu and Yang Shoulin, and procurator translators Gao Wenbin, Liu Jisheng, and Zheng Luda.
The Far Eastern Military Tribunal is an international trial led by the United States and Britain, mainly using Anglo-American proceedings, and the presence of strong evidence is crucial to the determination of the name of war crimes. However, because the Chinese side did not pay attention to collecting and retaining evidence during the war, and the Japanese side destroyed a large amount of criminal evidence after surrendering, the Chinese procurators were faced with a difficult process of collecting war crimes evidence. In the end, with the joint efforts of Chinese prosecutors, witness testimony and other evidentiary materials piled up more than a foot high were presented to the court, and finally the Japanese war criminals were brought to justice.
Tokyo Trials
The Secret of Eastern Wu Jurisprudence
Sheng Zhenwei, the first Chinese provost of Soochow Law School, once said: "For the purpose of legal education, we should not cultivate ordinary talents who seek utilitarian benefits for individuals, but cultivate legal talents who combine knowledge and action and have excellent character and learning for the national society." "The students who came out of Soochow Law School are probably the most proof of the energy of this school." This energy has exploded over the past 30 years, which has attracted countless people to explore the reasons - in 1989, the annual meeting of the American Legal History Society, the 1990 annual conference of the American Asian Studies, there have been many academic papers such as "Legal Education in the Republic of China Period", "Soochow Law School and Shanghai Lawyers" and so on (Sheng Yun, "Sheng Zhenwei's Philosophy of Running a School"). Alison W. Conner, a law professor at the University of Hawaii in the United States, has traveled back and forth between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, consulting a large number of archives and interviewing many Elderly People of Soochow to explore the history of the college and the role of its graduates in the development of the legal profession in modern China.
Soochow Law School pursues a professional elite education, believing that legal education should be basically professional and postgraduate education, and "strict entry and strict exit" is its way to achieve this goal, such as admission students must complete initial university studies before they can study law. In the early 1920s, at the suggestion of Provost Liu Bomu, the entry requirements were raised to at least two years of university. The Law School later introduced its own preparatory courses to ensure that students received a high level of pre-law education.
However, with the intervention of the Nationalist government, soochow law school was like other disciplines as undergraduate education, rather than vocational education at the postgraduate level, and the educational model of training professional lawyers was weakened, reducing the level of legal education. Even so, soochow law school's teaching is still heavy and rigorous. There were 71 students who entered the Soochow Law School in the same class as the famous comparative jurist Pan Handian, and 25 who received bachelor's degrees when they graduated in 1944, and even if some students who moved to Chongqing were counted, the ratio of the number of students who received their degrees at the time of graduation in 1944 to the number of students enrolled in 1944 would not exceed 50%.
In the mid-1920s, due to the introduction of Chinese law courses, the teaching of law schools became professional, and in fact it became more like comparative law. After the renaming of the "Soochow University School of Law" in 1927, the management of the college began to "localize", and the provost and the newly created dean in the same year were all held by Chinese - Wu Jingxiong, who returned from studying in the United States, was appointed as the first dean. Wu Jingxiong is a Juris Doctor from the University of Michigan Law School in the United States, and has engaged in philosophical and legal research at well-known universities such as the University of Paris, the University of Berlin, and Harvard University. In 1924, he taught at Soochow University, and then served as a judge of the Shanghai SAR Court, a legislator, a judge of the Judicial Yuan, the president of the Shanghai SAR Court, and the vice chairman of the Drafting Committee of the Legislative Yuan's Draft Constitution. Manly O. Hudson, a professor of international law at Harvard University, considers Wu a "master of various legal systems" and "has never seen anyone better suited to be the dean of a comparative law school."
Wu Jingxiong, Sheng Zhenwei and a group of other experts involved in the drafting of China's criminal law and civil code are not in favor of simply transplanting the laws of other countries to a country that urgently needs to establish a new legal system, and comparative law is showing its value at this time. With the promulgation of major Chinese laws, Soochow Law School offered a wide range of Chinese law courses, forming a dual-track teaching of Chinese law and common law, in which students could be trained in both common and American law and Chinese law, and between 1927 and 1939, the teaching of comparative law at Soochow Law School reached its peak. It is worth mentioning that in the 1920s, Soochow Law School also opened a master's class, and the regulations of the Graduate School instructed students to "study law in a comparative way". This is the earliest example of postgraduate education in law in modern China. By 1951, Soochow Law School had been conducting graduate education intermittently for more than 20 years.
At the opening scene of the moot court of Soochow University Law School, the original defendant, judge and defender in the courtroom are filled by students
In 1937, when the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out, Soochow Law School moved to the Shanghai Public Concession for refuge, and for the next 8 years the law school continued to operate at one temporary location after another. In December 1941, the Japanese army occupied the Shanghai Concession, and the law school was subsequently divided into two branches to continue to develop: from 1943 to 1945, the regular law school was reopened in Chongqing under the organization of Sheng Zhenwei; teachers and students in Shanghai temporarily avoided the concession and resumed classes under the name of the harmonic pronunciation of the Dongwu Law School," which resembled a business name, thus avoiding the attention and persecution of the Japanese and the pseudo. It was not until 1946 that the two branches finally merged and moved back to 146 Kunshan Road.
In the 1950s, Soochow University merged with other institutions to form Jiangsu Normal University (now Soochow University), the law department of Soochow Law School was merged into East China University of Political Science and Law (now East China University of Political Science and Law), and the Department of Accounting was merged into Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (now Shanghai University of Finance and Economics).
In 1954, soochow University Law School was rebuilt in Taiwan, continuing to highlight the teaching of anglo-American law and providing students with the opportunity to choose between civil law or comparative law majors, while three other schools with ties to Soochow Law School, Soochow University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and East China University of Political Science and Law, worked together to inherit the soochow legal tradition.
Author: Liu Liyuan Editor: Liu Liyuan
Planning: Wen Wei Po Science and Appraisal Department
*Wenhui exclusive manuscript, please indicate the source when reprinting.