Alford Tribute

Carol Steiker
Henry J. Friendly Professor of Law, Special Advisor for Public Service, Harvard Law School

I am delighted to take a moment in these turbulent times to pay homage to my colleague and friend Bill Alford. I count myself fortunate to have had many and varied opportunities over the years to engage with Bill – consulting on Graduate Program admissions, participating as a commentator in the Harvard-Stanford International Junior Faculty Forum, discussing my interest in the death penalty in China and Asia more broadly, exchanging ideas formally and informally about each other’s scholarly work, and planning academic travel to China, Taiwan, and South Korea. Bill has always graciously invited me to meet the many distinguished visitors that he has brought to the law school whose work touches my areas of interest – enriching opportunities for which I am deeply grateful.

In meeting the tremendously accomplished and interesting people that Bill has brought to HLS or to whom he has connected me abroad, I got an inkling of how Bill is perceived by the wider world. He is such a modest and down-to-earth person – what we call a mensch – that it is only through interacting with others that it began to dawn on me what an admired giant in his field Bill is. The combination of reverence and affection with which people invariably speak of Bill is a constant reminder of how much he is valued by his vast acquaintance, and how well he has lived his professional and personal life. From Bill, I have learned and hope to model the combination of kindness and high standards, of professional achievement and dedication to family, and of scholarly depth and action in the world. Harvard has been lucky to have Bill’s leadership in the Graduate Program, the East Asian Legal Studies Program, and the Project on Disability. And we have all been lucky to have his example, collegiality, and friendship.    

Scott Turow
Novelist, Author of “1L”; College roommate

I have known Bill Alford since we were friends and roommates as junior at Amherst College in 1968. Subsequently, we were reunited as law students at HLS when we both began our studies there in 1975. By then, Bill had completed his graduate work in Chinese Studies at Yale. 

I have watched from afar as Bill has made his pathbreaking contributions to Asian Legal Studies. He was, in the years after law school, a remarkably prolific scholar and that has always been the case. 

What is far more important to me as a friend is the person he became, as we both emerged from the relative emotional chaos of young adulthood. The grown-up Bill is a person of unrivaled emotional generosity, who understands that no one’s path through the world is ‘easy.’ He seems to approach all humans from a default position of love. That has made him a remarkable teacher and, for the wide circle lucky enough to be able to call him a friend, an invaluable ally and support.

He deserves to be celebrated in all ways – as a scholar, as a teacher, and as a highly worthy companion as we have traveled through life.  

Holger Spamann
Professor of Harvard Law School

Bill Alford is an accomplished scholar, a trusted advisor, and an effective organizer. To me, however, what stands out most about Bill is his dedication to other people’s wellbeing. It will always inspire me even though I fear I will never come close to matching it.

Some of Bill’s extraordinary commitment to other human beings is readily apparent from the list of important positions he has held and still continues to hold. Bill is a leading figure in the Special Olympics and the founder of HLS’s Project on Disability. Over the last decade and a half, he also dedicated much of his scholarship to legal issues surrounding disability.

Less obvious is Bill’s dedication to other humans’ wellbeing behind the scenes. I was privileged to observe first-hand Bill’s leadership of the Graduate Program, first as a student (2004-2009) and then as a faculty member on the Graduate Committee (2011-2019). Bill is incredibly committed to his students, his staff, and his colleagues. Starting with the last, least important group, Bill never, ever got aggressive or even pushy with us other committee members. His patience appears infinite. Bill was also unfailingly kind to his amazing staff and always made a point of expressing his gratitude for their work. Most importantly, Bill was a tireless advocate for “his” students—the LL.Ms, S.JDs, and visiting students both inside and outside our Committee. Bill knew all the students, attended every official student event from beginning to end, and spent countless hours every year meeting with students who wanted or required special attention. As a student, I noticed some of this, but I came to grasp the full, extraordinary extent of his commitment only when I joined the Committee.

Bill’s engagement with China is of a piece with the character. Bill knows China like few others. His East Asian Legal Studies Program has been bringing extraordinary Chinese lawyers to Cambridge for decades. Some of those lawyers are supportive, others very much critical of their respective home governments. Bill has endured criticism from both sides. This much is well known. Only those who know him personally, however, know why Bill puts up with the stress of running such a program. It is neither money, nor academic fame, nor any government’s interest nor, at this point in his life, intellectual curiosity. It is his dedication to helping people, in this case the Chinese people.

Bill has completed his extraordinary two decades of service as Vice Dean for the Graduate Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. We are fortunate that he is staying on as a Special Advisor. We are more fortunate that we have had, and will always have, his shining example to aspire to.

Samuli Seppänen
S.J.D. ’12, Associate Professor of Law at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

Finding the Way (Out) with Professor Alford

Thank you for inviting me to write this Tribute to Professor William Alford on his retirement from Harvard Law School. I was fortunate to be Professor Alford’s (it is still hard to commit to “Bill” in writing) S.J.D. student from 2007-2012, when he also directed Harvard Law School’s Graduate Program.

The Graduate Program provided its predominantly foreign students a sheltered existence. At the same time, the program felt slightly anomalous in Harvard’s all-American contest for esteem and influence. The S.J.D. degree itself is an odd creature in the American context, where all law degrees are graduate-level degrees, while law itself is not thought of as its own science. Conforming foreign sensibilities to the local academic game in Cambridge, Massachusetts, seemed challenging in many ways. However, we foreign students knew who in the Harvard faculty was interested in engaging with us. Professor Alford stood out as one of the most welcoming and cosmopolitan American law professors on campus, although he was characteristically modest about his role. In an S.J.D townhall meeting a student once asked Professor Alford why he had chosen to serve as the Director of the Graduate Program. His answer, which I suspect was only partly a joke, was that not many faculty members had wanted this role.

Professor Alford used to have an office in Pound Hall, a sinister mixture of 1960s concrete brutalism and “the International Style.” The Pound Hall – which was partly demolished in my final year at HLS – came from an America that declared its international ambitions loudly, and without much self-reflection. Professor Alford transcended these surroundings. On a personal level, Professor Alford would try to make his graduate students feel comfortable in at the Law School. This was a concrete effort: our meetings would start with Professor Alford offering me something to drink and even to eat. I believe there was a collection of snacks on his table for this purpose.

In more substantial terms, Professor Alford promoted a modest and respectful approach to the study of foreign law. The goal was to experience foreign law and Chinese law on their own terms rather than to use foreign law as a means for settling scores back home. Whatever score-settling there may have been before my time – Professor Alford had had a prominent role in criticizing Roberto Unger’s writings on China in the 1980s – I experienced him as a remarkably open and generous advisor, who encouraged me to explore all theoretical and ideological angles to my research topic.^[1]

At the same time, Professor Alford urged me to leave my baggage (figuratively speaking) behind when traveling to China. In one of our meetings in the gloomy Pound Hall, I described my plans for an upcoming research trip to Shanghai and Beijing. I was working on a map of ideological conflicts in Chinese legal academia. I had conducted some preliminary research on this topic and placed prominent Chinese scholars on my map in accordance with their ideological viewpoints. My intention was basically to visit Chinese universities and ask Chinese scholars whether my impressions were correct. Professor Alford listened to my description of the map, assured me that it was not bad, and then pointed out that Chinese scholars might be too polite to contest my findings. As a consequence, he implied, I might not get much out of my research trip. He suggested that I find another way to test my map. I recognized that this was a good idea. Yet somehow, I ended up doing more or less what Professor Alford had warned me against.

I may have not been the most receptive student, but something fundamental from Professor Alford’s guidance has stayed with me. Professor Alford’s reluctance to view China as a matter of local American or “Western” game caused a fundamental rethink for the purpose of my own research. Even now, as I rush towards a hasty judgment on a topic, I imagine him saying something sympathetic about my viewpoint, and then inevitably revealing the issue to be far more nuanced than what I had initially proposed.

Professor Alford’s approach to comparative law – a combination of modesty and respect – is not only an intellectual position but also an attitude and a character trait.^[2] Agreeing with this ideal intellectually and practicing it are two different things. Intellectually it is easy to accept that one should not impose parochial categories on say, Chinese legal thought. But to actually do this – to actually check in one’s ego at the airport – is a different matter altogether. To make the approach even more nuanced, suppressing parochial notions is not the same thing as having no normative opinions about foreign law. Professor Alford’s work on disability rights in China demonstrates that there is no need to lose one’s moral bearings in a foreign context.^[3] On the contrary, respect for others calls for critical engagement with them. In comparative law such engagement is often hard to find especially – and ironically – in scholarship that is most critical of the Eurocentric nature of comparative law.^[4] In contrast to the armchair critics of comparative law, Professor Alford’s long-standing personal engagement with Chinese scholars has created a vast network of colleagues and students around the world and in China, in particular. This network has given Professor Alford a uniquely comprehensive view of Chinese legal thought. As I reviewed my notes from our meetings for this Tribute, I found it remarkable how effortlessly he was able to lay out the detailed tapestry of Chinese legal scholarship in front of me.

Professor Alford’s humble approach to the study of foreign law is a difficult lesson for anyone. It is a particularly hard lesson to learn at an elite institution, such as Harvard, which teaches its students and faculty to “lead” others. Indeed, the will to leadership often seemed as self-evident and unexamined at Harvard as the dwindling swagger of its modernist architecture. More generally, it is a deep-rooted fantasy of some parts of the American legal academy that the intellectual leadership exercised by American jurists can help others reach their full potential.^[5] Roscoe Pound himself (of Pound Hall fame), sought to design legal institutions and methods of adjudication for the Republic of China. Pound maintained that his designs were based on local life in China rather than on blindly copied models from foreign countries.^[6] Yet the very project of basing legal institutions on local conditions turned out to be part of Pound’s home-grown campaign against analytical jurisprudence in the Western world, and of little consequence in China.^[7] Again, agreeing intellectually with a theoretical proposition is not the same thing as practicing it.^[8]

Even though Professor Alford encouraged me to approach Chinese law without vendettas, I never got the sense from him that my own preoccupation with parochial theoretical concerns and score-settling were wrong as such. It was just that there were far more interesting questions to be examined on China. Once after a meeting with Professor Alford, I was feeling particularly exasperated about my research topic and the entire enterprise of writing about Chinese law as a foreigner. Professor Alford was having none of it. There were so many fascinating topics to examine in China; things were changing fast and new research topics were coming up constantly; so much had yet to be done. As I was going through Harvard Law School’s Graduate Program, I was fortunate to have Professor Alford show me the way out of there.

 

[1] See William P. Alford, The Inscrutable Occidental? Implications of Roberto Unger’s Uses and Abuses of the Chinese Past, 64 Tex. L. Rev. 915, 965 (1986).

[2] Ibid at 954-966; William P. Alford, On the Limits of “Grand Theory’ in Comparative Law, 61 Wash. L. Rev. 945, 947 (1986).

[3] William P. Alford, Focus: Disability Rights in China and in the World: Editor’s Note, 11 Frontiers L. China 1 (2016).

[4] For a similar observation, see William P. Alford, How Theory Does – and Does Not – Matter: American Approaches to Intellectual Property Law in East Asia, 13 UCLA Pac. Basin L.J. 8, 18 (1994).

[5] Alford, On the Limits of “Grand Theory’, supra note 2, at 955.

[6] Roscoe Pound, Comparative Law and History As Bases for Chinese Law, 61 Harv. L. Rev. 749, 757-759 (1948).

[7] Ibid. 754.

[8] Alford, supra note 4, at 19.

Gerald Neuman
J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law, Harvard Law School 

No tribute, short or long, could adequately recount William Alford’s virtues and contributions. As his international law colleague and graduate committee member since I joined this faculty, I will emphasize here a few of the aspects I have often witnessed and admired: Bill’s intellectual rigor, his compassion, his generosity, and his graciousness. These are not separable elements of his personality and conduct, but intertwined in his integrity.  

Our most frequent occasions of interaction have involved the graduate program to which Bill has given inspiring leadership over all this time. Bill has made the annual meeting on doctoral program admissions one of the intellectual highlights of the academic year, with deeply substantive and highly collegial deliberations encompassing the diversity of methodologies represented on the faculty. The quality of our admissions has been strongly facilitated by Bill’s committed and tireless fundraising efforts on behalf of our graduate students. His shepherding of the program also draws on his diplomatic skills in dealing with some less virtuous HLS colleagues. Bill’s clear-sighted judgment of politics, on both the small and large scales, has been invaluable.

The erudition and insight that elevate Bill’s academic writing and  teaching, as well as his leadership on disability issues, also greatly enrich the life of the faculty.  He carefully critiques the writings of colleagues and he engages in generous, but demanding discussion with a range of visiting scholars.

Fortunately for us, as Bill decreases his administrative role, he is continuing to share his wisdom.  As we can see, the world continues to need it.

David B. Wilkins
Lester Kissel Professor of Law, Vice Dean for Global Initiatives on the Legal Profession, and Faculty Director of the Center on the Legal Profession at Harvard Law School

For the last 18 years, Bill Alford has been raising the bar on graduate and international education at Harvard Law School and around the world. The results have been transformative. The graduate student population is far more diverse and inclusive than ever before, both geographically and economically, with L.L.M.s and S.J.D.s now fully integrated with their J.D. classmates. At the same time, Bill has helped to make the J.D. program far more “international,” by working to raise the number of students with international backgrounds, pushing for the hiring of faculty with significant interest and expertise in international and comparative law, and, most significantly, by working with Martha Minow and others to create a requirement that every student take at least one course in international law.  

But in this brief tribute, I want to highlight a more personal transformation Bill has facilitated – my own.  In the early 2000s, Bill hosted a groundbreaking conference at HLS that brought together leading scholars from around the world and across disciplines to document the unprecedented efforts then underway to recast and expand legal professions in China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, and Indonesia. In an unprecedented – but for Bill typical – act of generosity and inclusion, Bill invited me to give an important introductory talk for one of the major panels at this event. Unlike every other participant, I was neither an Asia scholar, nor an expert on globalization or law and development. Instead, up until that conference, I had only studied the U.S. legal profession, with a particular emphasis on legal ethics and diversity. Inspired by this event, and Bill’s subsequent book Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia, the transformation of legal professions around the world has become a central focus of my work.

In 2010, I launched the Project on Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies – or GLEE as we like to call it – to study how globalization is reshaping the legal profession in important emerging economies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. GLEE has now produced books on India, Brazil, and China, and we have launched the project in Africa and Southeast Asia. And just as he was at the beginning, Bill has been there every step of the way, offering wise counsel and insight, vouching for the Project with funders and important people from his vast array of contacts, encouraging graduate students to get involved, and promoting our results. And he has done it all with his trademark quite modesty, never seeking reward or claiming the credit he deserves.

In his seminal book To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense, Bill eloquently argues that China’s deep cultural norms that ground the legitimacy of present ideas through their connections to the ideas and traditions of the past help to explain why China never developed the kind of Western intellectual property regime in which ideas are “owned” and off limits to others. It is an apt description of how Bill conducts his own intellectual life. Bill has never been concerned with “owning” ideas. Instead, he has dedicated his prodigious talent to building a community of scholars, students, and practitioners who share his unique commitment to both understand and critique the traditions and current practices of the countries of the world – including our own. It is an honor to have been welcomed into this blessed community, to borrow Dr. King’s evocative phrase, and I look forward to  grounding my work in the brilliance of Bill’s ideas and the warmth of his fellowship for many years to come.