The law school dedicated the new Academy for the Study of Chinese Law and Comparative Judicial Systems on Nov. 4 with an inaugural China Law Forum and dedication ceremony.
The forum featured a panel of four scholars from China University of Political Science and Law , which has partnered with the Maurer School of Law since 2000 , and a Chinese judge.
IU President Michael McRobbie and CUPL Vice President Zhang Baosheng first announced the founding of the Academy at a formal signing ceremony in Beijing in May.
Joseph Hoffman, a professor at the Maurer School of Law who supervises international programs, said the academy has two goals: to help the Chinese legal system with reforms in the way judges and the courts work and to strengthen the school’s relations in China.
“The point of this new project is to bring together people on both sides to talk about the law and to compare their notes, basically, about our legal systems,” Hoffman said.
Part of the project the two schools are working on involves a problem with the current court system in China. Many of the judges in China have become reliant on Chinese forensic crime labs to decide the verdicts of cases.
“We call it the ‘CSI effect’ here,” Hoffman said. “In the U.S., juries sometimes think that there should be DNA evidence in every case, and they’re really disappointed when they don’t see the DNA evidence ... well, in China, they have a real CSI problem.”
The academy will benefit not only the Chinese court system and IU in general, but also the law students and professors, Hoffman said. Some students were selected to sit in on the Nov. 4 forum to hear about Chinese law, talk to the CUPL professors and meet the students from China.
Students can also learn directly from this project by being hired on as fellows, traveling to CUPL to study and being in class with the professors involved in the project.
“It’s going to help a number of our professors become more familiar with Chinese law and Chinese legal concepts, which they can then use in their teaching of our students,” Hoffman said.
Bixin Li, a law student who graduated from CUPL and is at IU to earn a master’s degree in law, agreed that the academy will offer new opportunities for both China and IU.
“It could give us more opportunities to study, understand and even compare criminal law and criminal evidence law between Chinese law and American law in the future,” Li said. “I think it will help improve two law systems, especially in the criminal law division.”
Fellow law student Daoji Liu, a graduate student at CUPL who is here studying abroad, also said the relationship between CUPL and IU has helped him learn, mostly because China and the U.S. are so different.
“Here, students discuss law in class, and in China the professor just gives a lecture about the statute and some cases,” Liu said. “It’s just very different from China because we have completely different legal systems.”
The Maurer School of Law is one of four schools in the U.S. helping with this project in China, and it is also working with other schools around the world, including universities in South Korea, Australia, Germany and Switzerland.
IU was first contacted about the project by Thomas Man, a graduate of CUPL and IU and now a prominent lawyer and legal scholar in China.
“He was the one who personally came to us and said, ‘Hey, CUPL has this big new project and they’re looking for the right partners, would you guys be interested?’” Hoffman said. “And we said, ‘Of course.’”
