By Jerome A. Cohen
On hearing the news about the end of the Yale-NUS collaboration in 2025, I thought about my own efforts to develop a legal education program in China. About 20 years ago, colleagues at NYU Law School established an innovative five-year program of cooperation with the Law School of NUS. It was financed by the Singapore Government and brought many NYU law professors to Singapore, usually for the first time. I was trying to develop similar programs in China. Our China activities benefited from the stopovers some of my colleagues made en route to or from Singapore. Those visits, often their first to China, enhanced their interest in the PRC’s unique legal phenomena and in the many PRC students eager to study American law.
Almost a decade earlier, encouraged by my 1979-81 teaching of international business law to Beijing City officials, I tried but failed to unify our NYU law faculty in supporting a proposed program for establishing graduate law programs in both Beijing and Shanghai. Although many were eager to make a first visit to China, quite a few colleagues would not commit to a second stay, which made long-run planning difficult.
In 2004, after a stimulating stay in NY, a leading Shanghai Jiaotong University law professor urged me to set up some sort of cooperation with his law school. I told him that, although our new NYU US-Asia Law Institute could be relied on for support, I doubted whether he could obtain approval of Jiaoda’s participation because of USALI’s rule of law and human rights publications and programs. To demonstrate his school’s enthusiasm, he invited me to meet on campus with his university’s Party secretary and other leaders. At the meeting I reminded the Party secretary of my criticisms of the existing legal system. He responded that they had carefully checked my record and assured me there would be no obstacle. On that basis we went ahead and for a time I had a beautiful office in the law faculty’s handsome building on the new campus on the outskirts of Shanghai. Although we did manage to have a few programs, including a significant one at the Shanghai Stock Exchange and another that we convened on International Human Rights Day (the date’s significance did not dawn on our hosts til speeches began), our cooperation soon broke down because higher-ups within the Shanghai Party organization insisted that I withdraw from our joint efforts.
Subsequently the NYU Law School did establish a modest teaching program in Shanghai as part of the larger NYU-Shanghai project. It was one of several “Law Abroad” programs established by our law school. However, staffing it with regular NYU professors, and even enough students from NYU, soon proved a problem, and the effort gradually withered away. Our students preferred a semester in Paris and even Buenos Aires to one in Shanghai.