2021

Liu Hongchuan
LL.M.’99, Harvard Law School

I can’t recall exactly when I first met Professor Alford at HLS.  It must be in one of the many events organized by East Asia Legal Study when I was studying for the LL.M. in the late 1990s.  At that time, I was too timid to talk much with him as he was always surrounded by many students and scholars who loved and admired him deeply.

I had more opportunity to interact with him when I took his International Trade and WTO class. The rules and textbook about the subject are pretty boring. However, with his insightful guidance, tolerance and humor, the class never was boring. Unlike many professors in Chinese universities, he seldom gave long speeches about his own view of the legal issues at hand. Instead, he always encouraged students to give the issues serious thought and express their own points of view without hesitation.  He was extremely tolerant to different views no matter how naïve or absurd they may sound and only politely reminded you that there are other, at least equally convincing, arguments you need to take into consideration. The class took place in the late mornings and we often became quite hungry towards the end of the class. He often brought cookies to the class and we could eat cookies while enjoying his teaching.  It was a wonderful experience I never had before. I do not remember much what I learned, but I will never forget the warm, light and intellectually stimulating atmosphere of our class.

I really came to know him only after I graduated from the law school. Every time I came back to HLS, I always tried to meet him and when he traveled to China, he also found opportunities to meet me. As time went by, we found that we have one more thing in common: we are both fathers of an autistic child and we are constantly facing unique challenges in life that ordinary people will not come across. Again, he became another role model for me within the area of disabilities.  He taught me by his personal example how to turn a personal misfortunate into broader love and compassion for people at large. Last year in the heat of the US-China trade war, I invited him to give a lecture to our law school alumni in Beijing. As the graduates of Harvard Law School, we have all benefited greatly from the four-decade good relationships between China and the United States, but now the good times seem to come to an end. Prof. Alford reminded us that things may get worse before they get better and that we should not have unrealistic expectations that the old good times will come back soon. However, he also reminded us to keep confidence in the relationship in the long run and make our own effort to improve it. All the alumni took much courage, confidence and comfort from his lecture.

It seems to me that though he may not be the most brilliant professor of the law school, he is certainly the most beloved one among international students. Like Confucius and Socrates, he is first and foremost a great teacher who loves teaching and loves students with all his heart. I do wish that his life-long teaching and academic career will continue to flourish.

Yu Xingzhong 
Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Professor in Chinese Law, Cornell Law School

A Tribute to Professor William P. Alford

Introduction

Professor William P. Alford, a scholar of Chinese law and legal history, as he modestly styles himself, has served as the vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School (“HLS”) for eighteen years, leaving behind a remarkable imprint on international legal education and exchange. As his first doctoral student, I have had the great luck to benefit from his eminent guidance and unswerving support in many aspects of my life, both academic and personal, during my student years and thereafter. While his virtues hardly need any personal testimony as affirmation, I feel grateful to have been asked to write about him by the Harvard International Law Journal.

I had the privilege of doing my master’s and doctoral degrees at HLS between 1990 and 1995, under Professor Alford’s guidance. After graduation, I returned to HLS twice in 1998 and 2006, to co-teach with him. I also have made countless short-term visits to the university. Each time, I felt very close and fresh. Because HLS is continuously changing, there is always something new and exciting to see.

In celebrating his legacy, we are celebrating the achievements of a decent human being—as dean John Manning commented, a great teacher, a bridge of cultural exchange, an admirable mentor, and a modest gentleman with the quality of jade, as many Chinese intellectuals fondly say of him.[1] Professor Alford is a renaissance man: erudite and thoughtful, far-sighted, and knowledgeable with a deep academic background. In addition to his command of Chinese culture and law, he is also conversant in other Asian cultures and institutions. Professor Alford is known not only for his research on Chinese law but also for his work regarding intellectual property and human rights. His subtle and comprehensive research focuses on, but is not limited to, Asia. He is an intellectual with great humanistic concern and a strong sense of historical responsibility.

When we celebrate his legacy, there is much to be mentioned. In this Tribute, I humbly offer a few comments related to my experience in learning from him.

I. A China specialist of his own

To begin, I want to salute Professor Alford’s contribution to scholarship on Chinese law and legal history. Those of us in Chinese legal studies are familiar with his excellent work in Chinese law, but let me offer a few thoughts about its long-lasting significance.

He regards law as an essential part of a nation’s culture and people and attaches great importance to understanding its historical and cultural background. He is very well versed in legal thought and legal institutions of major legal families. In his writing, Professor Alford reflects deeply on a typical practice of treating China as a foil more than an object of research to be seriously studied, rejects mechanical understandings of Chinese law, and calls for an understanding of Chinese law on its own terms. His book, To Steal A Book Is An Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization, introduces the history of the development of intellectual property law in China while touching upon legal and cultural transplantation issues, pointing out that the intellectual property system introduced from the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not successful. The main reason is that the transplanters did not consider how different the Chinese environment was. There is no doubt that his insightful research on Chinese and comparative law has made important contributions to the field.

Professor Alford’s approach to Chinese legal tradition contrasts with two other approaches available as conventional wisdom: universalism and cultural relativism. Universalist interpretations of Chinese legal tradition are connected by their reliance on the idea that all nations’ laws and legal experiences follow a general evolutionary pattern. The differences between legal systems in developing and developed societies are matters of the degree of societal development. Exponents usually rely on an analytical model developed by an influential thinker and apply that model to China for comparative purposes. Typical of these interpretations are those employing models developed by sociologists like Karl Marx, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Ferdinand Tönnies. While to some extent these interpretations reveal aspects of the Chinese legal tradition, they also exemplify what the Chinese call cutting the feet to fit the shoes.

For cultural relativists, each legal system is a unique consequence of a given culture. Law is inherently shaped by culture and cannot be adequately understood without referring to the larger cultural context. They tend to spell out a legal picture that stretches the concept of law to include the whole intellectual universe. For instance, some have argued that the Chinese legal tradition fuses heavenly reason, state law, and human sentiments and embodies the great principle of heaven and humanity’s unity. They tend to emphasize the uniqueness of China’s legal tradition and its incompatibility with universal principles and practices.

Dissatisfied with purely universalistic approaches and skeptical of the usefulness of relativism, Professor Alford has taken alternative ways to approach Chinese legal tradition. Instead of relying on any existing legal epistemology or employing the deductive method that usually accompanies universalistic analysis, he resorts to the analogical method and specific legal concepts or legal relations for analytical tools and detailed legal aspects for the subject matter of analysis.

For instance, Professor Alford contributed to the elevation of our understanding of the formal criminal justice process in late imperial China by reconstructing archival materials and analyzing one of the most celebrated criminal cases in Chinese history—that of Yang Naiwu and Xiao Baicai.[2] It is a significant effort because before him, no scholar, Chinese or foreign, had charted in meaningful and explicated detail the full course of any one case that traversed the entire formal criminal justice system from the district magistrate to the highest reaches of imperial government. Through an overall introduction to the Chinese legal context at the time of the case and a detailed reconstruction of the case, he vividly recreates the behavior, thoughts, judgments, reasoning, and psychological states of the people in the courtroom and behind the scenes, as well as the pros and cons of the Qing dynasty legal proceedings.

II. A magnanimous heart

One of the significant achievements whereby Professor Alford has set an example concerns human rights. He has made enormous efforts in promoting human rights in Asian countries, especially in China, where things are complicated due to the cultural tradition and political environment. It is often difficult to get involved from the outside, and even hard to find where to get started. Very often, good efforts encounter unexpected frustrations.

Over the years, whether supervising a student thesis, hosting Chinese scholars, organizing training sessions for grassroots actors or holding conferences in the field of comparative law and human rights, Professor Alford applied his wisdom and negotiated his way to effectively promote human rights in China. A famous Chinese saying succinctly describes his pursuit in that he “corrects his way but does not calculate what benefits will bring him; adheres to principles without hurrying after success.”[3]

The well-known Harvard Law School Project on Disability Rights, which Professor Alford co-founded, has volunteered in several countries, including China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Vietnam, on disability rights issues. It has been very well received by Asian countries, being not only a socially beneficial program but also one of pedagogical significance.

In dealing with various difficulties the promotion of human rights in China often encounters, he embodies a subtle way of thinking: “When the water is clear enough, I wash my hat; when it is muddy, I wash my feet.”[4] Behind all these tremendous human rights involvements is a great person who has a magnanimous heart—humane, sympathetic, generous, and tolerant.

III. A never-tiring teacher 

Professor Alford has been seen as a generous mentor, never-tiring teacher, and role model; as having achieved high moral and ethical status and commanding heartfelt admiration and respect; and as an ideal teacher in the Confucian tradition, and indeed, other great cultural traditions.[5] Over the years, he helped numerous students from diverse ethnic and geographical origins, academically and otherwise, to complete their education at HLS. Like his scholarship, his way of teaching exemplifies the most refined style of the work: polite but demanding, inspirational but realistic, laying stress on the present but also emphasizing historical background. His students surely remember the meticulous comments Professor Alford left on their papers!

However, what characterizes the true relationship between Professor Alford and his students does not stop here. His practice of Maimonides’ teachings on how to care for others distinguishes his role as a teacher, the highest degree of which is to help the students one supports become independent, from educating them to finding a way of living for those students.[6] In doing that, he is no longer just your teacher, but a close friend or a relative as well. That is true in my case, and that of other students, for which we are eternally grateful.

Professor Alford likes to quote from Xunzi, a Confucian-Legalist-Taoist thinker who thrived around third century B.C.E, to encourage all his students: “Blue dye derives from the indigo plant, and yet it is bluer than the plant; ice comes from water, and yet it is colder than water.”[7] This means that a good student should surpass his teacher. Whenever possible, he made arrangements to help his student. He has a research project on Roscoe Pound and asked me to collect Chinese materials on Pound. Having gone through some papers written by scholars on Mainland China and Taiwan, I wrote a brief introduction for him. He then gracefully suggested that I be his co-author. That was something I never dreamed of. This anecdote also attests to what a decent human being he is. 

Conclusion 

Professor Alford has been described as a monumental bridge between cultures in the West and East. His wisdom and generosity have inspired generations of students, academics, and lawyers in many corners of the world. In celebrating him, I see no better way than continuing his effort to build that bridge to effectuate more substantial exchanges between and among scholars. I wish him longevity and blissfulness.

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[1] In May 2019, more than fifty Chinese legal scholars gathered at the People’s University of China (“Renda”) to honor Professor Alford for his contributions to China’s legal education and legal reform. Many scholars, including Wang Liming, vice president of Renda, Zhu Jinwen, Han Dayuan and Wang Yi, former and current deans of the Renda Law School, Wu Zhipan, former dean of the School of Law and current vice president of Peking University, Wang Zhenmin, former dean of Tsinghua University Law School, professor Liang Zhiping of the Chinese Academy of Arts, professor He Weifang of Peking University Law School, expressed their appreciation of him and his friendship. See As Elegant as Green Bamboos—A Collection of Papers Commemorating the Exchange Between Professor William Alford and the Chinese Legal World (绿竹猗猗—安守廉教授与中国法学界交流纪念文集) (Guo Rui & Miu Yinzhi eds., 2019).

[2] William P. Alford “Of Arsenic and Old Laws: Looking Anew at Criminal Justice in Late Imperial China” California Law Review, December 1984.

[3] See Dong Zhongshu, “The Great Officers of Yue Cannot be Considered Humane,” in 董仲舒《春秋繁露·对胶西王越大夫不得为仁》, Luxuriant Gems of the Spring and Autumn, edited and translated by Sarah A. Queen and John S. Major (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016) P. 328.

[4] Quoted from an old Chinese folk song. “沧浪之水清兮，可以濯吾缨；沧浪之水浊兮，可以濯吾足。”

[5] See supra note 1.

[6] See Maimonides’ Eight Levels of Charity, in Charity: an Anthology (Yanki Tauber ed.), https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/45907/jewish/Eight-Levels-of-Charity.htm (last visited Nov. 25, 2020).

[7] An Exhortation to Learning, in Xunzi: The Complete Text 1 (Eric Hutton trans. and ed., 2014).

Ruth L. Okediji
Jeremiah Smith, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

A TRIBUTE TO PROFESSOR WILLIAM P. ALFORD

I arrived at Harvard Law School (“HLS”) on a cloudy day in September 1991, fresh out of college and reeling from a miraculous journey that had landed me in front of the International Legal Studies (“ILS”) building. Still, I recall the keen sense of disappointment that washed over me as I looked at the industrial architecture of ‘the ILS,’ as I would eventually fondly call it. This imposing granite structure that was my portal to the campus stood cold, unwelcoming, and to my mind, impenetrable.

Within weeks, I settled into classes far removed from my intended course of study in intellectual property. Harvard had no course offerings in the subjects that commanded my most significant interests—innovation, legal regulation of technology transfer, and law and development. Limited courses aside, I had to work three jobs on campus, given the minimal funding for the Graduate Program. Between midnight shifts at Langdell, 6:00 a.m. morning shifts at the Hark Café, and babysitting stints during the weekends, I studied Corporate Law, Economic Analysis of the Law, and Constitutional Law.

Although life was unusually challenging, these subjects of which I was a reluctant student were fascinating. The menu of new ideas and perspectives to which I was exposed, and the opportunity to analyze, contest, and engage them in class was vivifying. In some ways, my irreverence for the then-dominant HLS business law curriculum freed me from constraints imposed by deference or respect; being disinterested but also eager to make good on my time at HLS allowed me to discern my own biases and to revisit my scorn of approaches to law that appeared, on the surface, to avoid tackling troubling issues of global justice. In the end, it was these courses that prepared me far more than I could have foreseen for my encounter with the man whose impact on my education at HLS and on my academic career has been immeasurably significant.

In the spring semester, I enrolled in a course titled “International Law: Legal Aspects of Transnational Economic Activity” taught by “William P. Alford.”  It was a new course by a new professor about whom students lacked information. The course “endeavor[ed] to provide students with an understanding of the fundamental legal questions that arise in transnational economic activity and of the manner in which the different cultural, economic, and political orientations of those involved therein shape the formulation and resolution of such legal questions.”[1] Like most course descriptions at the time, this one had the rhetorical draw of an architectural plan. Nonetheless, its allusions to the role of culture, pluralism, and the dynamics of power in shaping law made for a quiet revolution in my time at HLS.

In the classroom, Professor Alford was brilliant, funny, and compelling, true. Nevertheless, these were not what compelled my attention. It was that he saw and heard me. At times, it appeared the entire class would fade away as he and I engaged in extended conversations about the exercise of sovereignty in global markets, the merit and methods of legal transplantation, and the complexity of reforming international organizations to better address challenges in developing countries. Professor Alford had a prescient sense that American assumptions about law did not reflect the international economic system’s future. In urging students to examine American hegemony’s unstable underpinnings, he taught us the importance of intellectual humility. He deftly drew students of different backgrounds and views into a vibrant debate, cultivating a kind of multicultural dialogue that was too rare in the HLS of those days. I sat riveted in his class, my hand rarely down, taking in as much as I could and as much as he was willing to give, which was a lot.

In addition to the challenging coursework, such as concerning the complexities of political power as expressed in the design of tariffs or rules governing custom unions, Professor Alford’s classroom was a laboratory for cultivating new ideas that I could safely test only in the distinctive global space he created during his lectures. My final paper in the course laid the intellectual foundations of my doctoral work on the U.S. copyright system and the unfolding negotiations over trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights,[2] which he supervised.[3] Professor Alford was an outstanding supervisor; his criticism of my work was piercing and always delivered in a way that pushed my thinking and strengthened my voice as a scholar. His nurture of, and trust in, my intellectual instincts fueled my exploration and study of interdisciplinary critiques of colonialism, law, and cultural institutions, the fruits of which continue to inform my scholarship till this day.

One anecdote about Professor Alford’s pedagogical style will have to do. He often came to class with props, of which my favorite was a set of Mickey Mouse ties that he would cycle through wearing, and which he had bought while in China. One reason he wore them was to help students visualize that all-too-abstract force we call “globalization.” He sought to illustrate the permeability of culture, and the overt and less overt ways in which culture manifests itself, is accessed, and is transformed through transnational economic activity. The existence of Mickey Mouse ties made in China put into question the assumption that cultural artifacts could be “just” American, or “just” Chinese, instead of things that are reinterpreted continuously, reframed, and recast to meet the exigencies of different cultural locations. This remains a profound point and represents a subtlety still too often left behind in more recent and polarizing debates about such matters as cultural appropriation or the efficacy of legal transplantation.[4]

I must mention Professor Alford’s research briefly because it so indelibly set the stage for my scholarship. In his first and still best-known book, To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense,[5] readers confront a wedding between an argument for more cultural empathy and Alford’s generous spirit. In that work, he argued that Western attempts to impose copyright and patent regimes on China floundered because of a scant understanding of Chinese “political culture,” according to which strict state control over the dissemination of ideas is necessary to protect citizens’ ability to maintain their Confucian heritage.[6] Such a culture, the development of which Professor Alford traces from the Qing dynasty to the People’s Republic of China and past the Cultural Revolution, leaves little room for promoting private property interests in idea or expression. Accordingly, he concluded that the Western endeavor to alter Chinese attitudes toward intellectual property is “incapable of generating the type of domestic rationale and conditions needed to produce enduring change and, moreover, runs a serious risk of discrediting [its] very message.”[7]

Whether this account of Chinese history is too driven by elites operating from the top down, or if it uses terms like “culture,” “society,” and “politics” in a manner looser than what contemporary social scientists would prefer is still open to debate. I would argue that it is rare for works that ask defining questions of a field to be as nuanced in how they address those questions. Professor Alford himself anticipates—and, to his credit, accepts—the criticism that he has interpreted his subject matter according to his own socio-cultural location. He acknowledges that he relies “on definitions of intellectual property derived from Western settings,”[8] even as he warns “against extrapolating normality from the West,”[9] and recognizes that “at no time is any society’s culture monolithic, given class, gender, ethnic, regional, and other differences.”[10]

I want to highlight three ways in which Professor Alford has influenced my work, as an illustration of the remarkable manner in which he has shaped an entire generation of scholars now tasked with building on his foundational insights.

First, and most simply, there has been the pivot to Asia, the sense in which a consideration of the global intellectual property system will necessarily be incomplete without a deep understanding of the workings of China’s contributions to and goals for the system. There is now an elaborate set of specialized intellectual property law tribunals, with their appellate court, namely the Intellectual Property Court of the Supreme Court, and with more than 200,000 cases heard per year.[11] American law firms have found it increasingly necessary to litigate within this system, and, indeed, foreign patent holders are more likely to win infringement cases and receive larger damage awards than Chinese patent holders.[12] China is firmly established as one of the top five patent offices in the world, and with 58,990 Patent Cooperation Treaty (“PCT”) applications, applicants residing in China filed the most applications in 2019. The World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) reports that “[t]his was the first year since the PCT System began operating in 1978 that applicants from the U.S moved down to second place.”[13]  Professor Alford’s observation that “conditions that breed protection for intellectual property rights are also those that breed competition with regard to [the design of] intellectual property”[14] law is now the central consideration in discussions about the intellectual property system’s future.

Second, Professor Alford articulated the fundamentally value-driven and constructed nature of intellectual property law. Every nation, Professor Alford reminds us, has “enduring values and practices” that are central to its identity, and which “foreigners . . . should not too readily assume they have either the moral authority or capacity meaningfully to influence.”[15]

In the research trajectory that followed my graduate work, I tried to historicize the idea of “innovation” that Anglo-American intellectual property law has traditionally protected.[16] The field had long treated that term interchangeably with “creativity,” even though organizational psychologists distinguish between the two. Building on many conversations with Professor Alford, my early work sought to establish that “innovation” is just one way of thinking about creativity and, indeed, a deeply culturally inflected one. I argued that varieties of creativity exist, each closely linked with the social structures, institutions, and cultural practices that make up a particular form of the good life.[17]

Moreover, the insistence on the inevitability of values foregrounds the question of justice in intellectual property law. Professor Alford is not a theoretician concerned with defining the nature of law or justice per se, and he has expressed doubts about the feasibility of any “grand theory” in comparative legal work.[18] However, he does ask us to consider the real effect that intellectual property rules have on people, not least those living outside of a narrow set of privileged economies. Such intellectual property rules are useful when they prevent “lives lost, gruesome injuries sustained, and medical procedures altered due to adulterated pharmaceuticals and other counterfeited products,”[19] but oppressive when they legitimate state crackdowns of human rights.[20] And the latter phenomenon is not peripheral to the field of intellectual property but, instead, something that lies at its center.

In my work, I have tried to show how intellectual property rules can generate new forms of marginalization in the Global South even as they encourage innovation there. Thus, the story of intellectual property law is incomplete without considering how it has been used to, say, privatize tools essential for addressing pollution and climate change, limit access to antiretroviral medications for HIV/AIDS, and restrict access to educational materials.[21] In this way, far from a technocratic discipline, intellectual property is central to some of the most pressing issues of justice facing a globalized world today.

A third lesson I have taken from Professor Alford is deeply personal, but perhaps the most important one of all. It is that empathy in scholarly work is legitimate, and it multiplies. If I come to empathize with someone very different from myself, that may well enable me to engage with a much greater universe of people, who may be affected in very different ways by a variety of structural forces. Conversely, those who start down some path of prejudice too often end up alienating themselves from the very people who might have helped them to turn back. Both empathy and bias end up being force multipliers.

Not too long ago, Professor Alford began co-editing a multi-volume collection of oral histories of individuals with intellectual disabilities in China.[22] This perhaps surprising development in his scholarly trajectory clicks perfectly into place when one reads the observation of a co-editor, Mei Liao, that oral history has mostly remained an American and British affair, despite its potency in letting disadvantaged groups speak to the world in their own voices.[23] Therefore, the project represents processes of cultural transformations at their best and is an extension of Professor Alford’s longstanding empathy for developing countries to a specific community of disadvantaged inhabitants in those countries. That empathy is something I have woven more boldly into my work, such as on how persons with print disabilities encounter the copyright system.[24]

If shifts in the global economy have forced us to rethink our most foundational assumptions about the nature and role of law in society, then intellectual humility is sorely needed: we must attend to the possible narrowness of our views and be empathetic to those offering alternate perspectives. Throughout his career, Professor Alford has embodied this ethos, and his consideration of culture as integral to the academic enterprise has had indisputable consequences for Harvard Law School. As head of the Graduate Program for eighteen years, he has shaped an unparalleled program attracting diverse minds from every region worldwide. Significantly, he extended dignity and hospitality to those minds. Under his leadership, LLM students would no longer arrive already informally ranked according to their country of origin’s global prestige. The Program became more egalitarian, more humane, and more intentional in guiding students’ intellectual growth, especially those from less well-resourced legal systems, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. Those students can access the breadth of the theoretical and doctrinal cutting-edge curriculum that Harvard offers. Significantly, today, they can do so without the crushing weight of financial burdens. No one in today’s Graduate Program has to juggle three jobs alongside a rigorous academic schedule.

A final word: If to steal a book is an elegant offense, we should also remember another Chinese proverb, often translated as “what you cannot avoid, welcome.” The world we live in is full of turbulence and promise, but there are opportunities to steer it toward the good for others at every step. After defending my doctoral dissertation, Professor Alford took me to lunch at Changsho, a veritable institution among Harvard Law students. When the conversation turned to my future plans, he said, “Who knows? You might be back here as a faculty member one day.” I remember reacting in the same way I had done earlier to the business law curriculum—with dismissive skepticism. Professor Alford proved me wrong again. I will be forever grateful that he welcomed all of me not only those many years ago in his class, but always since then.

 

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[1] International Law: Legal Aspects of Transnational Economic Activity, Harv. L. Sch. Catalog 128 (1992), https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/drs:427005630.

[2] See Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, Apr. 15, 1994, 1869 UNTS 299, 33 ILM 1197.

[3] Along with Professor Arthur Miller and Professor Leroy Vail of the History Department.

[4] See Toby S. Goldbach, Why Legal Transplants?, 15 Ann. Rev. L. Soc. Sci. 583, 597 (2019) (lamenting the lack of use of social science methods, or consideration of “power dynamics, competition, and contingency,” in the transplants literature).

[5] William P. Alford, To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (1995).

[6] See id. at 28.

[7] Id. at 118.

[8] Alford, supra note 6 at 4.

[9] Id. at 5.

[10] Id. at 6.

[11] See generally William Weightman, Is the Emperor Still Far Away? Centralization, Professionalization, and Uniformity in China’s Intellectual Property Reforms, 19 UIC Rev. Intell. Prop. L. 145 (2020).

[12] See Renjun Bian, Patent Litigation in China: Challenging Convention Wisdom, 33 Berkeley Tech. L.J. 413, 460.

[13] WIPO, Patent Cooperation Treaty Yearly Review 19–20 (2020).

[14] Alford, supra note 6 at 123.

[15] Id. at 120.

[16] See Ruth L. Gana, Has Creativity Died in the Third World? Some Implications of the Internationalization of Intellectual Property, 24 Denv. J. Int’l L. & Pol’y 109, 116–17 n.25 (1995).

[17] See id. at 133 (“Whereas the stated underlying purpose of Anglo-American intellectual property law is to encourage creative endeavor, protection of creative endeavor in Third World societies is purposely used to achieve a myriad of social, political, and economic goals.”).

[18] See William P. Alford, On the Limits of “Grand Theory” in Comparative Law, 61 Wash. L. Rev. 945 (1986).

[19] William P. Alford, Making the World Safe for What? Intellectual Property Rights, Human Rights and Foreign Economic Policy in the Post-European Cold War World, 29 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 135, 136 (1996).

[20] Id. at 144–45.

[21] See Ruth L. Okediji, Does Intellectual Property Need Human Rights?, 51 N.Y.U. J. Int’l L. & Pol. 1, 32–54 (2018).

[22] See 1–3 An Oral History of the Special Olympics in China (William P. Alford, Mei Liao & Fengming Cui eds., 2020).

[23] See 1 An Oral History of the Special Olympics in China, supra note 22, at xviii.

[24] See, e.g., Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land, Ruth L. Okediji & Jerome H. Reichman, The World Blind Union Guide to the Marrakesh Treaty: Facilitating Access to Books for Print-Disabled Individuals (2017); Laurence R. Helfer, Molly K. Land & Ruth Okediji, Copyright Exceptions Across Borders: Implementing the Marrakesh Treaty, 42 Eur. Intell. Prop. Rev. 332 (2020).

Martha Minow
300^th Anniversary University Professor, Harvard University

A Scholar and Administrator Attuned: Saluting William Alford

The English verb “attune” means “to bring into harmony” or “to make aware or responsive.”  These may not be qualities typically associated with a lawyer, legal scholar, or university administrator, yet they are exemplified by the work of William (Bill) Alford across his career thus far. Notably, in his seventeen years leading Harvard Law School’s Graduate Program and International Legal Studies Program, and even longer service as Director of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard, Bill has infused these initiatives with kindness, generosity, intellectual rigor, and his distinctive ability to weave meaningful connections across diverse nations and communities.

All of these qualities are further illustrated by his work as the founding Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability which provides pro bono services on issues of disability in many nations, including China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Implementing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in nations that do not embrace a framework of individual rights could create genuine difficulties. Yet, illustrating attunement to cultural differences, Bill and his colleague Michael Stein effectively work to enable individuals and groups and especially persons with disabilities and their representative organizations to undertake informed human rights advocacy. This example surfaces three elements that continually inform Bill’s work: 1) insight from comparative study; 2) deep engagement with people; and 3) humility and judgment.

I. Insights from Comparative Studies

Bill is of course one of the world’s leading experts on Chinese law and legal history. Just as his scholarship draws insights through comparative work, his academic leadership reflects curiosity, respect, and analysis revolving around contrasting cultures and national traditions. In a lecture he delivered at Harvard upon his appointment as the inaugural Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor of East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, Bill described comparative legal studies and another kind of comparison: learning from the past to understand the present.[1]

His classic contribution in To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization moves from the initial recognition of a clash in international trade law between Western and Chinese conceptions of intellectual property law.[2] The book’s immersion in historical, cultural, economic, and political traditions identifies different world views around property ownership, profit as a motive, as well as contrasting perspectives on cultural and political pride and power. Finding comparisons within comparisons, the book also affords lessons from internal political developments toward Western-style intellectual property law in Taiwan that contrast with less successful external pressures for China to move in that direction.

In Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (Harvard East Asian Legal Studies 2007), Bill and his fellow editors and contributors trace dramatic growth in legal professional work in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia.[3] By considering these varied settings, the work illuminates distinctive relationships between law and state authorities and between law and historically disadvantaged individuals and communities. The essays show nuanced attention to similarities and differences and to contrasts that are not even well-captured by those categories. In these and other scholarly efforts, Bill displays the resistance to ethnocentrism and awareness of the impact of perspective and the opportunities for self-reflection that characterize the promise of comparative studies.[4]   His approach embodies this recognition, well-stated by author Louis L’Amour: “Much of the study of history is a matter of comparison, of relating what was happening in one area to what was happening elsewhere, and what had happened in the past. To view a period in isolation is to miss whatever message it has to offer.”[5]

Bill’s popular classes (Comparative Law: Why Law? Lessons from China; and Comparative Law Workshop) feature immersion in alternative settings and deepening attention to assumptions, often unstated, about points of departure. This approach also guides the many workshops, gatherings, and informal conversations supported by the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies with heightened elements of fun and humor. Attracting the most talented individuals from around the world to advanced legal education, the Graduate Program at Harvard Law School does not only pursue research and leadership through law, it also builds a network—during schooling and beyond—of extraordinary individuals who become leading scholars, lawyers, and political figures around the world. The strength of that network connecting students across generations owes more to Bill than can be fully expressed.

During his time as vice dean, Bill conceived, designed, and constructed rich linkages with universities in other countries. These connections make it possible for hundreds of Harvard students to study and work abroad and for students and faculty from other nations to spend time at Harvard. Expanding the graduate program to regularly bring students from more than seventy nations to study at Harvard, while maintaining its policy of need-blind admission and need-based financial aid, Bill is devoted to creating opportunities and nurturing talented individuals, which has created the largest concentration of sub-Saharan African law students in any school in North America. Year after year, students arriving from nations that had never sent any to Harvard Law School found a welcoming and congenial community of scholars eager to learn from one another with the curiosity and respect exemplified by Bill Alford.

II. Deep Engagement with People

Year after year, Bill engages deeply with individual students, visiting scholars, faculty colleagues, staff, and others. Providing a sounding board, gently probing their ideas, vigorously forging connections and opportunities, and quietly assisting with personal problems, Bill becomes the go-to person in so many people’s lives. He remembers details about people’s families and passions and circles back with more ideas and connections. His devotion to his wonderful family is mirrored in his capacity to make others feel like members of his family.

When I was dean of the Law School, I witnessed these qualities in Bill over and over, notably, including with alumni in gatherings around the world. Walking with Bill down the street in Beijing, in Taipei, in Hong Kong, and in Seoul is like walking with a rock star. Some of the fame comes from his work co-founding the first academic program in the People’s Republic of China on American law and the first national exchange program to bring Chinese students to the United States for legal education; some from the trust he has earned by both the governments of the United States and governments of other nations; as well as frequent requests for advice from multilateral organizations, foundations, civic groups and nongovernmental organizations, law firms and businesses. Bill’s public service work connects him with efforts around human rights, law reform, and the legal profession, and allows him to create deep ties with new colleagues. Bill brings these connections and resources back to Harvard and also models for students, visiting fellows, staff, and colleagues the power of allies and friends.

He is known and admired by so many people. His honorary degrees, distinguished lectureships, and awards are too many to recount. He is humble about all of this and about so much else. The level of respect and affection he has earned goes well beyond recognition of his knowledge and wisdom. It emanates from more profound appreciation for his ability and commitment to connect on a personal, human level.

III. Humility and Judgment

Bill does not carry expectations of being treated as a “rock star.”  Indeed, he tends to dismiss recognition of his own accomplishments and qualities. This humility may well be Bill’s superpower. It lies behind his approach to others, his comparative study, and his openness to learning.

Yet Bill is not lacking in self-respect nor in the ability to make rigorous and vigorous judgments. In assessing scholarship and giving students feedback, Bill may be kind but he highlights problems and makes clear what could and should be better. In reviewing proposed academic initiatives, funding sources, and policies, Bill is stringent in his judgments of quality, integrity, and risks. As a colleague and as a friend, I am so grateful to be able to turn to Bill for his unfaltering good judgment.

Having humility allows for respectful communication and acknowledgment of potential mistakes or misunderstandings even in the course of making judgments. But humility should not entail suspension of judgment or doubt about the ability to judge. As the common saying goes, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.”

As Bill steps down from his enormous duties as vice dean for the Graduate Program, he will have more time for his vital scholarship and mentoring, his international pro bono and advising work, and for his ongoing leadership of the East Asian Legal Studies Program and the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. How terrific that his many communities will still benefit from his insights from comparisons, his engagement with people, and his powerful combination of humility and judgment.

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[1] See Learning from the Past to Appreciate the Present, Harv. L. Today (Dec. 19, 2018), https://today.law.harvard.edu/in-learning-from-the-past-to-appreciate-the-present-alford-draws-from-confucius-and-contemporary-china/.

[2] See William P. Alford, To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization (1995).

[3] See Harv. E. Asian Legal Stud., Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia (William P. Alford ed., 2007).

[4] See Gunter Frankenberg, Critical Comparisons: Re-Thinking Comparative Law, 26 Harv. Int’l L.J. 411, 439 (1985); see also Vicki C. Jackson, Ambivalent Resistance and Comparative Constitutionalism: Opening up the Conversation on “Proportionality,” Rights and Federalism, 1 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 583 (1999).

[5] Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man 167 (1990).

Lo Chang-fa*
Taiwan’s Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization (“WTO”); former Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of China; former Dean of National Taiwan University College of Law

Passion and Compassion Being the Key Characteristics of a Successful Legal Educator: Professor William P. Alford Is Hao Laoshi with Such Characteristics

1. Introduction

The term “老師” (laoshi) used in Taiwan does not only refer to its plain meaning of “teacher”; it is also an honorific title to show respect to a person who serves as a mentor to her students and has guided and inspired them not merely in their skills and academic performance, but also in their proper manners and behaviors toward other people and proper attitudes toward managing various matters (that is, “為人處事” or wei ren chu shi). In some eastern societies, when people discuss education, a “good teacher” or “好老師” (hao laoshi) is always the key component for a successful education at all levels.

In Taiwan, there is still a tradition of giving high respect to hao laoshi not only by the students, but also by the whole society. In order to be considered a hao laoshi, one must be able to meet certain high standards, including being passionate and compassionate enough to engage in authoring writings in order to advance her thoughts about certain fundamental values (that is, “著書立說” or zhu shu li shuo), to teach both by words and by her own example so as to show that she is also practicing the values that she is proposing (that is, “言教身教” or yan jiao shen jiao), to teach without any partiality so that the disadvantaged people also have similar opportunities to receive her guidance (that is, “有教無類” or you jiao wu lei), to teach in accordance with the students’ aptitude so that not only smart students would become better, but also less sophisticated students can progressively improve (that is, “因材施教” or yin cai shi jiao), and to have an extensive sense of social responsibility to care disadvantaged groups or individuals (that is, “社會責任感” or she hui ze ren gan).

The standards of hao laoshi might not be universally agreed upon. However, they are useful standards to help us reflect whether there have been some important elements that need to be incorporated into legal education. These standards are also useful in helping us identify a dedicated hao laoshi in legal education so that we can express our respect and gratitude to her.

Traditionally, legal education emphasizes the improvement of students’ legal skills and abilities, including skills in logical, analytical, and critical thinking, and abilities in presenting an opinion or arguing for a case in a clear and persuasive manner. What is not particularly emphasized in legal education in many (or most) jurisdictions is building the fundamental human values into the mindset of law students and integrating the passion and cares for society and compassion for the disadvantaged people into the nature of law students.

In order to build certain fundamental values into the mentality of law students to enable them to unequivocally distinguish legally and ethically right from wrong, and to ensure that the law students are equipped with necessary passion for the society and compassion for the disadvantaged groups and individuals, we really need hao laoshi in the law schools. We have to expect that law professors also have passion and compassion to engage in legal education by words and by their own examples. The suggestion of having passionate and compassionate law professors to nurture law students with this mindset does not mean that legal skills and abilities are not important. Actually, legal skills and abilities on the one hand, and faithful respect of fundamental values as well as caring the society and the disadvantaged people on the other hand, are two fundamental pillars of a respectable jurist.

If we are to use these benchmarks suggested above to present a perfect example of hao laoshi in the field of legal education, Professor William P. Alford of Harvard Law School is definitely the one who meets all the high standards and deserves the utmost respect and gratitude.

In this Tribute, I will lay out the reasons and some supporting facts to show why Professor Alford is hao laoshi and is really a teacher of teachers.

2. Being Passionate in Authoring Writings in Order to Advance His Thoughts

Here, the meaning of authoring writings to advance one’s thoughts includes not only publication of books and articles, but also initiation of creative academically and socially meaningful programs or proposals. Publications and initiatives need creative thinking and enormous efforts. Both of them can generate similar long-lasting positive impact on legal education.

Professor Alford has very creative writings and programs in many areas of law. His areas of interest include comparative law, Chinese law, legal history, U.S.-Chinese relations, disability law, international trade law, legal profession, transnational and global lawyering, and international legal education, among other fields.[1] Notwithstanding the wide variety of Professor Alford’s fields of interest, they all lead to a common theme, which is the promotion of international aspects of legal training in order to enable law students to address complicated international legal issues involving other countries (especially China and some Asian countries) and to be more aware of disadvantaged people in different jurisdictions.

Professor Alford has many new ideas, several of which have become important programs that he launched. For instance, he brought in the idea of “internationalization” to Harvard Law School’s curriculum and co-curricular activities. He also launched a program to allow students to earn credit when spending a semester in other countries. He also spent so much effort to develop a very innovative matching gift program in support of graduate student financial aid.[2] These are not merely technical changes of curriculum and school policies. They actually have great positive impacts on the evolution and development of the school and its legal education. These innovative programs and initiatives are also support the main theme of encouraging law students to look at things from an international perspective and recruiting more talented international students to join the law school community so that people with different backgrounds can enrich each other in their school time and beyond. Indeed, an atmosphere where people from different countries with diverse cultural backgrounds can comfortably learn together and know each other’s legal systems is of key importance to the mutual enhancement their systems and to making a better world.

Professor Alford’s writings have been published worldwide and are of high importance in relevant fields. The following books are examples showing his great passion in authoring writings and in advancing his thoughts of caring for disadvantaged people: To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization; Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia; 残疾人法律保障机制研究 (A Study of Legal Mechanisms to Protect Persons with Disabilities); Prospects for the Professions in China; and Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation.[3]

Professor Alford’s active practice of zhu shu li shuo shows his great passion. And his achievement in this regard is admirable.

3. Being Passionate to Teach by Words and by His Own Example

A hao laoshi does not always need to instruct students about what is right and wrong. Students are competent enough to see what and how their professor is behaving and whether their professor is performing righteousness as she is telling them to do. They compare whether their professor’s words match her day-to-day practice. Many students consider their teacher as a role model. If a professor merely incorporates into her law school curriculum certain fundamental values to unequivocally distinguish legally and ethically right from wrong, such fundamental values might not sink into the mentality of law students. However, if a law professor practices what she is advocating, it is far more persuasive and could have much greater impact on students.

As indicated above, Professor Alford cares about disadvantaged people. He cares very much about the performance and development of human rights protection in many countries. I have the honor to co-edit with Professors Alford and Jerome Cohen the above-mentioned book, Taiwan and International Human Rights: A Story of Transformation. From my personal experience working with Professor Alford, he cares so much about human rights development in Taiwan and was enthusiastic in telling the world the story. He also personally authored a chapter for the book, which is entitled “People Over Pandas: Taiwan’s Engagement of International Human Rights Norms with Respect to Disability” (with Qiongyue Hu and Charles Wharton). This shows his great compassion in caring for disadvantaged people who live on the other side of the globe and in caring about the legal system that protects such vulnerable groups. Another example of showing his genuine interest in caring for disadvantaged people is reflected in Professor Alford’s book, An Oral History of the Special Olympics in China.[4] The volumes include individuals with an intellectual disability telling their life stories. For many people, it is hard to imagine that a Harvard Law Professor would care about people with intellectual disabilities in a distant country. But caring about such disadvantaged people in different corners of the world is an integral to the character of Professor Alford.

Professor Alford is not merely advocating for the enhancement of disadvantaged people. He also initiates and participates in many innovative programs to help people in need. For instance, Professor Alford was co-founder and chair of the very active Harvard Law School Project on Disability (“HPOD”), which works “to enable persons with disabilities to claim their full and equal human rights” and “to develop equitable societies that respect the equal autonomy and dignity of persons with disabilities.”[5] Under the program, there have been many creative pro bono works on disability conducted to improve human rights situations in many jurisdictions (including China, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Vietnam, and several other nations) under HPOD.[6] Also very impressively, he serves as the lead director and vice chair of the Special Olympics’ Board of Directors.[7] Although Professor Alford is humble enough to consider himself being “blessed to have been involved with Special Olympics for the past two decades,”[8] he is actually needed by the organization and is able to make unique contributions with his profound legal background and enthusiasm. It is fortunate for many disadvantaged people to have Professor Alford caring about them and helping them.

Professor Alford teaches us not only by his writings, but also by his own example about being compassionate toward disadvantaged people and being passionate in personally engaging in the protection of such group of people and in the enhancement of their welfare through various innovative ways. He is really practicing yan jiao shen jiao.

4. Being Compassionate to Teach International Students Without Any Partiality and to Teach in Accordance with Students’ Aptitude

At Harvard Law School, there are many foreign LLM students.[9] A large portion of them come from economically and democratically less developed countries. They need special help and support in order to get into Harvard Law School and to afford their stay. As mentioned above, Professor Alford developed the matching gift program to support those students in financial need. The program helps Harvard Law School to admit students “irrespective of financial need and career goals.”[10] In Professor Alford’s words, “That is the right thing to do … as it enables Harvard to enroll the best and most diverse range of graduate students—in terms of geographic and demographic background, life experience, and intellectual and professional aspirations—of any U.S. law school.”[11] This reflects Professor Alford’s personal character of being so compassionate and willing to recruit international students from many disadvantaged regions of Africa and Asia. His students even commented that “[t]here are nations that will never be the same because of his gracious tenacity and commitment to enabling the Graduate Program to support students—rich and poor; from every nation, tribe and creed.”[12] He is actually practicing the noble concept of you jiao wu lei.

Many students from Asia, Africa, and developing countries love to have formal and informal discussions with Professor Alford. Many students love to choose him as their supervisor, based on their understanding that Professor Alford is willing to listen to their thoughts (despite being preliminary and immature when they are expressed) and to give insightful feedback. Engaging in discussion with Professor Alford makes them feel comfortable and is rewarding. Here I quote Professor Ruth Okediji’s words about Professor Alford: “He has an eye for identifying promising young scholars”; he “wasn’t just a teacher; he was also an intellectual refuge. I could raise questions, bounce ideas [and] scrutinize things with him.”[13] Professor Alford’s way of treating and nurturing students is a best practice of yin cai shi jiao.

5. Having an Extensive and Compassionate Sense of Social Responsibility and Responsibility to the Community

Many law professors (but not all) in their jurisdictions have a sense of responsibility that they would devote to help their students become good lawyers and would engage in correcting social injustices. But not many people are able to consistently and continuously sacrifice their valuable time for several decades to help make society and the community better.

If we look at Professor Alford’s previous achievements, we can easily identify the enormous passion and compassion in taking up the responsibility for the matters he was proposing or handling. As mentioned above, Professor Alford currently initiates and engages in many programs to help disadvantaged people in different countries. This is a manifestation of his compassionate sense of social responsibility.

In addition, he served as vice dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School for eighteen years. One might not be able to imagine that a brilliant law professor who has so many opportunities to expand his personal connections and to enhance his own academic reputation would want to spend such an extended period of time endlessly supporting the school and perpetually helping international students. He really has a very strong sense of responsibility to the school as a smaller community and to the larger community at the global level.

6. Concluding Remarks

It is difficult to use such few words to describe a person who has contributed to legal education for a long time. But if one has to choose, “passion” and “compassion” are the words for such purpose. These are perfect words to describe Professor Alford.

This Tribute is prepared not merely to pay my highest respect to Professor Alford for his passion and compassion in legal education, but also to remind those who engage in legal education that there could be some elements missing in the design and practice of the current legal education in many jurisdictions. Professor Alford, being a hao laoshi and teaching both by words and by his own example, helps us to revisit the current legal education and to identify aspects of legal education that need to be emphasized.

This Tribute is not to propagate the virtues of a remarkable individual only because I know him well. I am sure people who know Professor Alford would agree on what I have mentioned. The fact that Professor Alford was awarded so many honors[14] in so many places shows that he has been globally recognized for his academic achievements and his contributions to many societies in different corners of the world.

Professor William Alford is hao laoshi based on the most rigid standards. I am proud of the fact that he is my laoshi.

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* Taiwan’s Permanent Representative to the World Trade Organization (“WTO”); former Justice of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of China; former Dean of National Taiwan University College of Law. Professor Alford was the second reader of the author’s SJD thesis at Harvard Law School. The author would like to express thanks for the opportunity to participate in the publication of the Tribute. He can be reached at [email protected].

[1] For a full list of Professor Alford’s areas of interest, see William P. Alford, Harv. L. Sch., https://hls.harvard.edu/faculty/directory/10010/Alford (last visited Nov. 25, 2020) [hereinafter Alford].

[2] After 18 Years, Professor Alford Completes his Tenure as Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and ILS, Harv. L. Today (August 17, 2020), https://today.law.harvard.edu/after-18-years-professor-alford-completes-his-tenure-as-vice-dean-for-the-graduate-program-and-ils/.

[3] Alford, supra note 1.

[4] See An Oral History of the Special Olympics in China (William P. Alford, Mei Liao & Fengming Cui eds., 2020); for brief introductions of these volumes, see Our Work, HPOD, https://hpod.law.harvard.edu/publications (last visited Nov. 25, 2020).

[5] See HPOD, supra note 4, Our Mission.

⁶  Id.

[7] Board of Directors, Special Olympics, https://www.specialolympics.org/about/board-of-directors (last visited Nov. 25, 2020).

[8] Id. William Alford.

[9] Typically, each year the LLM program at Harvard Law School accepts 180 students from about 70 countries. LLM Program, Harv. L. Sch., https://hls.harvard.edu/dept/graduate-program/llm-program/ (last visited Nov. 25, 2020).

[10] Harv. L. Today, supra note 2.

[11] Id.

[12] This is the statement made by Ruth Okediji, LLM ’91 SJD. Id.

[13] Id.

[14] These honors include an honorary doctorate in law by the University of Geneva; an honorary professor or fellow at Renmin University of China, Zhejiang University, the National College of Administration, and the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Science; the inaugural O’Melveny & Myers Centennial Award; the Kluwer China Prize; the Qatar Pearls of Praise Award; an Abe (Japan) Fellowship; and the Harvard Law School Alumni Association Award. Alford, supra note 1.

Jerome A. Cohen
Professor of Law, New York University School of Law

Putting Lawyers (of All Types) High on Professor Alford’s Future Agenda

Happily, this is neither an obituary nor a tribute to a retiring teacher, but an expression of thanks for the extraordinary number of years that William Alford has impressively devoted to the major challenges of academic administration at a great international law school. Yet this should also be seen as a celebration of liberation, marking a new period and new possibilities for the honoree’s already illustrious scholarly career. Given the daily increasing prominence of China and the still underappreciated significance of its distinctive legal system, he need not fear the dilemmas of Charles Lamb’s “Superannuated Man,” nor dread the observation of Henry Adams that “nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.”

Indeed, Professor Alford’s problem is precisely the opposite. A classic scholarly multitasker, he has too many temptations on his plate. In addition to continuing the innovative and stimulating teaching that has informed over three decades of the world’s future lawyers, law professors, and researchers to the benefits of studying comparative law, he will, of course, continue to lead the Harvard program in East Asian Legal Studies that has fostered the training of so many promising young scholars and produced so many distinguished contributions to learning and practical affairs. But what will be his future research priorities?

Professor Alford has already done much to build on and choose from. As he has demonstrated, China’s millennial legal traditions offer lifetimes of satisfying preoccupation and appear increasingly relevant to contemporary understanding. Chairman Mao Zedong’s revolution has become Chairman Xi Jinping’s imperious and, some would say, imperial rule. Professor Alford and his able academic partner and spouse Yuanyuan Shen have also sought to remind us of the importance of modern China’s family law, a subject that attracted great interest in the 1950s as one of the first legal consequences of communist “liberation,” but that has largely faded from public view despite the subsequent huge changes in Chinese society. Or he surely might wish to further develop our knowledge of China’s laws and practices relating to people with special disabilities, a field that he has done much to create and even to foster beyond academe. Also notable is his longstanding thoughtful concern for the roles that lawyers and their functional substitutes have played or ought to play in post-1949 Chinese political, economic, and social life, a topic that might well be extended to focus on intensifying restrictions on criminal defense lawyers and repression of human rights lawyers.

Yet there are so many other areas of comparative and international law relating to China that cry out for exploration and that would benefit from his attention. For example, the myriad complex constitutional and criminal justice problems revealed by the Central Government’s recent “takeover” of what in 1997 had been the United Kingdom’s “handover” of Hong Kong to the motherland could easily prove totally absorbing. And Beijing’s lack of success in attempting to impose “one country, two systems” on Taiwan has enabled the island’s talented and courageous people to establish a democratic legal system that is genuinely different from the mainland’s increasingly totalitarian counterpart and that warrants greater study for many reasons. So too does the emerging effort of the People’s Republic of China (“PRC”) to employ public international law in a powerful campaign to displace the United States as the dominant influence in the United Nations and related organizations. And Professor Alford would have much to say about the implications for the law of genocide and crimes against humanity of the horrors that the PRC persists in perpetrating in its Xinjiang and Tibetan regions.

The list of potential topics is long, and he will feel more than ever the tensions occasioned by the need to choose. Justice Brandeis wisely observed: “Self-limitation is the master’s mark.” Yet Robert Browning urged: “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp or what’s a Heaven for?”

Other contributors to this welcome Festschrift undoubtedly have their own ideas, but I want to take the opportunity extended by the invitation to participate to suggest that Professor Alford expand on his previous work relating to China’s contemporary lawyers and various functional substitutes operating in different arenas of a vast, diverse and all-too-opaque country. Perhaps it is not surprising that, as he has pointed out, we still know far too little about the “litigation sticks” as well as the courthouse scribes, innkeepers, and others who sought to assist, for good or ill, the defenseless targets of the criminal justice system of the Manchu-Qing dynasty, the last in a lengthy imperial succession. Yet, despite the obstacles created by the efficient secrecy of Xi Jinping’s Party-state, it seems more urgent to inquire systematically and comprehensively into the lawyers of today. Professor Alford and other students of the sociology of law have already told us a great deal, but, as they would be the first to admit, they have only scratched the surface, whetting our appetite to learn about 2020 realities.

There is, of course, more than a single “legal profession” in China at present, even if one excludes from consideration the large number of legally-trained participants at various levels in the overlapping government and Communist Party bureaucracies, the judiciary, the procuracy (prosecutors’ offices), the legislative institutions, the law school faculties, the government-sponsored research organizations, and the range of specialists who perform tax, accounting, intellectual property, labor, notarial, and other law-related functions.

There are many kinds of practicing lawyers in the PRC today. Most apparent to foreigners are the “big law” commercial law firms that now rival in numbers of licensed personnel and revenues the international firms that they have learned from and emulate. They often have multiple offices within the country and even some foreign offices. Some have created various forms of cooperation with foreign counterparts at home and abroad. Yet most licensed lawyers operate in medium- to small-size clusters, congregating in China’s many urban centers. There are also some—but far from enough—who work in more dispersed, rural areas where finding enough colleagues to form a firm often remains a challenge.

However, many other persons who are not licensed lawyers also perform a range of legal services as para-professionals. They usually receive official financial and other support and operate among people who are less well-served by licensed professionals, in urban as well as rural areas. Under a variety of names, they have rivaled the formal legal professionals in their numbers and in the quantity, if not the quality and scope, of legal service provided. Professor Alford astutely recognized and has long followed the tensions and developments that this too little appreciated competition has created in what he has termed “the battle over legal professionalism in China.”

A generation ago, in a series of publications, Professor Alford called our attention to this emerging phenomenon and the disturbing conflicts of interest and ethical infractions that both professional and para-professionals were encountering. One essay, attractively titled “Tasselled Loafers for Barefoot Lawyers,” particularly caught my interest.[1] Fifteen years later, in a detailed 2010 update, he gave the PRC’s non-professional “basic-level legal workers” another colorful sobriquet, christening them “rice-roots legal workers” because of their autochthonous involvements.[2]

To me, an interesting aspect of this latter essay was its brief discussion of what should be recognized as yet another broad category of unlicensed functional substitutes for legal professionals—genuine “barefoot lawyers,” those who not only lack “tasseled loafers” but are also so poor and uneducated that they utterly lack the background and training deemed desirable for “rice-roots lawyers.” Professor Alford selected as an example of “barefoot lawyers” the blind Shandong province rural activist Chen Guangcheng, whose initial efforts to use local courts to protect the rights and interests of fellow villagers attracted favorable national publicity in the earliest years of this century.

My personal acquaintance with Chen’s case is probably the main reason that I focus here on Professor Alford’s studies of Chinese lawyers and admiringly suggest that he devote substantial time to research on the professional/para-professional tensions and developments of the most recent decade.

I had met Chen when he and his extraordinarily devoted wife were State Department sponsored visitors to the United States in early 2003 and invited them to Beijing that fall while I was serving as a visiting professor at Tsinghua University Law School. After a long afternoon in a Beijing bookstore purchasing many surprisingly good “how to do it” pamphlets devised to help non-lawyers cope with legal problems, Chen invited my wife and me to visit his literally dirt-poor village in Shandong’s remote countryside. No one, he persuaded me, could fully appreciate the plight of “barefoot lawyers” and their “clients” without such a visit. Three days of interviews with Chen; his often penniless, elderly, disabled, and uneducated “clients”; and other villagers vividly illustrated the situation.

There were then five lawyers in the county seat, unlike some Chinese counties that had no lawyers whatever. But the local lawyers reportedly could not be relied on to take on cases of impoverished villagers who wanted to bring grievances against country government offices or the administrative village governments below them. There was no money in it for the lawyers. Moreover, being dependent on local officials for much of their work, the lawyers did not want to bite the hand that fed them. As an alternative, the local “rice-roots legal workers” were available in principle, but, because they were on the government payroll, they failed to inspire popular confidence in their independence. This had inspired Chen to attempt to fill the gap in legal services through his own self-study and initiatives.

Encouraged by the national publicity first accorded his efforts, Chen hoped to recruit at least two “barefoot lawyers” for each of over forty neighboring villages. With the aid of Beijing lawyers and law teachers, he hoped to organize informal training for these recruits at the only hotel in the area. In an effort to enlist help from the Tsinghua University Law School, I arranged for Chen to meet with the then dean and the deputy dean of the school plus the Beijing lawyer who was most active in supervising the school’s relevant clinical program. Chen, an articulate speaker, made what I thought was an effective presentation of the perceived need for training and his ideas for meeting it. Yet, except for the sincerely interested Dean Wang Chenguang, who later served as visiting professor at both Harvard and New York University law schools, Chen’s reception from the other two important legal figures was frosty, indeed embarrassingly impolite. They were hostile to assisting “barefoot lawyers,” who they were certain would only ruin their efforts to enhance popular respect for the legal profession. They gave no weight whatsoever to the fact that millions of rural citizens throughout the country had no meaningful access to independent legal services. As they ostentatiously read the day’s newspapers during Chen’s presentation, I was glad for once that he is blind.

Undeterred, Chen nevertheless asked me to take part in the proposed training. I agreed to do so but did not share his optimism. I warned him that county officials would never allow us to conduct training for almost a hundred would-be “barefoot lawyers” who could be expected to cause them nothing but trouble. Before we were put to the test, however, Chen was detained and placed under around-the-clock house arrest and ultimately convicted and imprisoned for more than four years because of his court challenges and other public opposition to the provincial government’s arbitrary punishments of the families of thousands of local women who had fled compulsory abortion and sterilization.

This personal experience led me to share Professor Alford’s belief that China’s government, the Communist Party, the Ministry of Justice, and the professional bar cannot remain indifferent to seriously inadequate legal representation, especially in the countryside, and should take vigorous steps to rectify the situation. This would improve—not damage—the reputation of China’s legal profession, and Professor Alford’s continuing strong support for this reform would surely speed its progress.

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[1] William P. Alford, Tasselled Loafers for Barefoot Lawyers: Transformation and Tension in the World of Chinese Legal Workers, 141 China Q. 22 (1995).

[2] William P. Alford, “Second lawyers, first principles”: lawyers, rice-roots legal workers, and the battle over legal professionalism in China, in Prospects for the Professions in China 43 (William P. Alford, Kenneth Winston & William C. Kirby eds., 2010).