East Asian Legal Studies
Harvard Law School has a very prominent program in comparative law, the East Asian Legal Studies Program. It is headed by the Vice Dean for Graduate and International Program, Prof. William P. Alford, who is also Henry L. Stimson Professor of Law at the Law School. Prof. Alford is a foremost authority on Chinese law and legal history.
I went to their opening reception last week, and met quite a few visiting scholars, LLM students and Americans who're interested in East Asian law. Many of the scholars are already well-established practitioners or judges in their home jurisdictions, and their presence has been very enriching to the intellectual life here. Prof. Alford also mentioned several of his research projects, including the RAPID development of the legal professions in China (from 3000 in 1978 to 150,000 today) and its impact on social change and control; the development of disability law in China; and American jurisprudential scholar (and former Harvard Law Dean) Roscoe Pound's adventure in China after his Harvard years (1946-1949) and how this very unique experience has influenced his views later in his life.
It is very interesting, since I will also be meeting up with some of my new friends tomorrow for dinner, and I thought it's always good to keep a company of "comrades" who share one's intellectual interests. Some of them are 1Ls from the States, one a visiting student from Berkeley and another an LL.M. from Hong Kong. I'm looking forward to the conversations tomorrow.
Visit to Maine and Vermont
I'll be away this Sunday to visit some Friends in Auburn, Maine and South Starksboro, Vermont. This should be a very rewarding experience, since it's the first time I'm going to set foot on this part of the Nation, northern New England.
New England, Massachusetts included, is famous for its autumn leaves. Many actually drive here every year just to look at those leaves, which I was told make quite a stunning sight. Right now it's probably a bit too early, though I've already seen maple leaves scattered along the jogging trail around Fresh Pond the other day.
In the meantime, I've also signed up to be a subciter for the International Law Journal. Hopefully I'll get to subcite Prof. Benjamin Liebman's work on libel and defamation laws in China. Liebman, an associate professor of law at Columbia, is a very accomplished scholar in Chinese legal studies, and the director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia. Many of his original sources are in Chinese, so hopefully I could help a little in this editing process.
Commercial ads
I saw some commercial ads posted as comments under my entries in recent weeks. I want to clarify that although this is a quasi-public journal, it is dedicated to some kind of purpose, namely, the inquiry of the phenomenon of our species ("the phenomenon of man," to quote from Teilhard de Chardin.) Any comment unrelated to the articles or which does not serve the purpose of this journal will be deleted permanently. Thanks.
Some more readings
I am currently reading a new book, Moran Man and Immoral Society, written by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent Neo-Orthodox Protestant theologian and public intellectual in the early and mid-20th century. It's essentially the manifesto of Christian Realism. Interestingly, Professor Niebuhr is one of the chief architects of the Just War doctrine.
In the meantime, I've also ordered Professor Charles Fried's "Contract as Promise" online, which, according to the amazon comments, is a defense of the classical liberal understanding of the nature of contracts. Since I'm taking contracts right now, it should be a thought-provocative read.
A third book that I'm looking into is Richard Nixon's "Leaders." In it Nixon analyses the strengths and weaknesses of his political contemporaries, Churchill, de Gaulle, Khrushschev, etc. It has to be a fun read since the author knew all these guys in person, and had actually fought most of 'em as adversaries (or at least recalcitrant allies...) in the international arena...
The uncertainty inherent in the common law
So far we've been studying mostly the common law, that is, rules formulated by judges in deciding actual cases. We've read a little bit of blackletter law, mostly formulations contained in secondary sources, such as the Restatements of Contracts, etc., and some primary authorities like the Uniform Commercial Code, but for most part we study cases.
This is so very interesting, because it reveals the fallacy of the average person's idea that we actually have "laws out there, ready to be applied to individual cases." This is probably quite a naive formulation, since in so many cases, judges simply have to act as "activists" and come up with new rules to fill the gaps in the existing bodies of case law to cope with circumstances that arise in moments of great socio-economic changes...
Last night I read an English case, decided in the 1820s in the Court of Common Pleas in London. The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas wrote the opinion himself. It was about whether an actor who breached one of the stipulations in an employment contract should pay the entire sum specified in the contract as 'liquidated damage.' Sir Nicholas Tindal the Chief Justice ruled that he does not. And when he ruled, he didn't cite any authority to support the ruling; he merely noted that for "a very large sum should become immediately payable, in consequence of the nonpayment of a very small sum...appears to be a contradiction in terms, the case being precisely that in which courts of equity have always relieved, and against which courts of law (such as the Common Pleas-JC) have, in MODERN TIMES (such as ours...) endeavored to relieve..."
He ruled this way since to require the breaching party to pay a very large sum in this case is to impose a penalty on it. Now if the objective of contract law is to force parties to perform the contracts, this would be fine. The more penalties, the better. But then this is not the point of having contract law in a capitalist society. In a credit-oriented society, the point is not to penalize the breaching party, it is to offer the following option to it: either you perform your contractual obligations, or you pay the other party the interest he would expect to gain by entering into this contract with you (I believe it was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes who said this.) If we attach too much penalty to a contract, people would have problems entering into it in the first place, and such a tendency may hurt an economy based on the institution of credit, or money-lending.
So the law is malleable. And I'm glad that it is.
Settling down in Cambridge
I have more or less settled down in my new hometown, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The environment here is gorgeous, and the people very nice and friendly. Yesterday I went jogging around Fresh Pond, and loved the scenery there.
Both my law school section leader and my new classmates seem to be very nice people. My section leader, Professor Jon Hanson, successfully (as far as I could feel) created a fairly laid-back yet intellectual atmosphere our first day in class. A graduate of Yale Law School himself, Professor Hanson places great emphasis on the underlying principles and social theories of the law. The first case we discussed has to deal with the McDonald's obesity case, which is fun. (We also watched the movie "Supersize Me!" and had a fast food dinner together!)
Today I went to worship in the Friends Meeting at Cambridge (http://www.fmcquaker.org) with my friend Jeff Hipp, whom I first met this last semester in New Jersey through our mutual friend Martin Kelley (http://www.nonviolence.org). There are some very interesting people here, and it's a large congregation, with more than a hundred people worshipping together. I also met Jonathan Vogel-Borne, Field Secretary of the New England Yearly Meeting, in person, and had a wonderful conversation with him.
Aside from all the new friends I've made, I am going to hang out with several Penn people next week as well. There are Andy, in his second year at Harvard Law; Anil, who's doing a very prestigious engineering internship at MIT; and Tara, an Master of Public Health student at Harvard who's already got a Ph.D. in political science from Penn under her belt. It should be very cool.
