Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Contemporary Asian Reading of a Seminal Text

Law schools are peculiar places occupied by, dependent on, associated with, and exerting influence on a myriad of institutions and stakeholders. From law students’ efforts at mastering the allusive skill of legal reasoning to the challenges both tenured and untenured academic staff face in the neoliberalist higher education model where the legal profession and the consumers of the law school product exert increasing – and sometimes even impossible – demands, law schools and its populace have always been contested, hierarchical and image-conscious spaces. Indeed, as Ralph Shain noted in the Journal of Ideology in 2012, “[a]nyone who has suffered through law school would be grateful to have a good polemic against the institution”. This article offers such a polemic against legal education in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Over a period of four years, a selection of postgraduate law students from one of the (three) higher education institutions responsible for legal education and training in Hong Kong were asked to reflect upon their legal studies and future roles as legal professionals with reference to the 1983 self-published pamphlet by Duncan Kennedy, entitled “Legal Education and the Reproduction of Hierarchy: A Polemic Against the System”. Kennedy’s essay offered a critical analysis of the role of legal education in American social life at that time, and the manner in which it reproduced hierarchy in law, legal education, the legal profession, as well as in society generally. The narratives informing this article show that almost 40 years subsequent the publication of Kennedy’s text, and in a jurisdiction with an altogether different social context and facing its own political turmoil and civil rights’ aspirations, many parallels can be drawn with what Kennedy had observed in 1983. Part I of this article sets the scene with a detailed overview of the legal education and training landscape of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region from a legal-historical perspective to date. The discussion and analysis * Associate Professor in Law, Lincoln Law School, University of Lincoln (United Kingdom); Member of the International Centre for Higher Education Management (ICHEM), University of Bath (United Kingdom). E-mail: alerouxkemp@lincoln.ac.uk