Alford Tribute

Lan Lan
J.D. ’94, Harvard Law School

Professor Alford cares. He cares about how people feel. He always takes painstaking efforts to ensure people around him are not hurt and are at ease.  

Professor Alford refuses to be judgmental. This can be frustrating to people who want to categorize everyone and everything, as I did when I first came to HLS in 1991.    

I was brought up in Beijing during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. According to Chairman Mao, we had to always know who our enemies were and who our friends were. Yes, there were only two categories of people in China during those years: friends and foes. 

It was in one of Professor Alford’s classes/seminars in which mainland Chinese students and Taiwan students debated each other regarding the status of Taiwan.  An S.J.D. student from Taiwan told me to my face that he did not want Taiwan to be part of China and that he did not want to be a Chinese.  This shocked me to the core and I was looking to Professor Alford to be our judge. Of course, he did not take either side’s position. Instead, he continually nudged us to look at the issue from the other side’s perspective. Professor Alford’s seminar was a life-changing experience for me. Thanks to Professor Alford, I learnt to tolerate, and even began to understand, views harshly different from mine, and I also learnt that there is a much much bigger diversity than just friends and enemies. These changes prepared me for my next 20+ years of legal experience in representing international clients from all kinds of backgrounds. By the way, that Taiwan S.J.D. student and I have remained good friends to this day.

For the above reasons, I am eternally grateful to Professor Alford. 

Ezra Vogel 
Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University

We are deeply saddened by Professor Vogel’s passing in December, but extremely grateful he was able to share a few words in this tribute to Professor Alford. 

I have known Bill Alford from the time he arrived at Harvard and have kept in touch with him since. He has been an ideal colleague. He has been a great teacher to thousands of students, Chinese as well as American. He has been a leader in research and writing in the field of Chinese law. He has been a wise administrator. And he has been a wonderfully warm and considerate colleague.

Bill Alford 万岁

Karen Gottschang Turner
Professor, College of Holy Cross; Chinese Legal Historian

Bill Alford and I met in the late 1980s , and I honestly cannot remember how it happened, but I do know that he read my doctoral dissertation and in time we connected over ideas about Chinese legal history. Bill’s understanding of my project was very welcome, especially at that time, for I was challenging some deeply ingrained conceptions of the role of law in China’s classical tradition. Not all of my colleagues in the field were supportive of my argument that law played an important role in the early empires, and Bill was aware of this issue. He later wrote a brilliant critique of the lack of attention to law in the Chinese tradition in an article:  “Law, Law, What Law?:  Why Western Scholars of Chinese History and Society Have Not Had More to Say about Its Law,” in Modern China, Oct., 1997. After I joined the East Asian Legal Studies program at Harvard Law, Bill continued to support those of us working on Chinese legal history and provided an intellectual home that inspired and supported many of us as we continued on in our work. I know that Bill is well known and appreciated for his generosity and care for friends and colleagues, but I wanted to note in particular my own appreciation for his own work on Chinese legal history and for helping a field develop over time.