Philip J. McConnaughay, dean of Penn State's Dickinson School of Law, will be moving to China to take over as dean of Peking University’s School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, China. He starts August 1. McConnaughay is a graduate of the University of Illinois College of Law and previously taught at Illinois before moving to Penn State. This announcement follows quickly on his statement that Penn State is planning on splitting into two law schools.
The Peking school presumably is waiting for the ABA to rethink whether it will accredit law schools outside the United States; the school was created to train Chinese lawyers for the American bar – in China. Peking University's recent submission to the ABA on this topic is here.
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It is easy to understand why the ABA is having some problems with granting accreditation to this or any other Chinese law schools. Students are not guaranteed anything close to what we, in the U.S., would consider rudimentary freedom of speech, and law professors cannot select (not even bring into China) textbooks that the regime may consider dangerous. These seem to me to be rather important elements of the U.S. system of legal education. Why foster the proliferation of law schools that do not abide by these basic principles? While I support gradual convergence, this does not appear like the right way to go about it.
Sorry, John Doe, but what you say is not true. The students at STL study First Amendment with the legal director of the ACLU of Southern Calfornia and human rights law with a former ABA president. See http://stl.pku.edu.cn/en/Courses. The country censors, but on campus speech is free.
"The country censors, but on campus speech is free." Oxymoron.
I see where you are going, John Doe. The real problem with accreditation of overseas law schools is that, while they might spread the rule of law and western legal values such as free speech, they might slow the flow of foreign LL.M. tuition dollars. We need that money to maintain our current leisure/teaching balance, on which so much depends. American academics should make all possible arguments to protect that vital income stream.