CNews Issue 3, 2009

...they are now writing longer judgments because they see the importance of judicial reasoning in deciding cases, and the reasoning has to be open to scrutiny and debates. Being the only common law jurisdiction in China’s civil law system, the Faculty believes it has a critical and indispensable role to play in developing common law on the Mainland and contributing to the modernisation of the Mainland’s legal system. The Master of Common Law (MCL) programme was introduced in 1997 to train promising law scholars, judges and government officials in common law and to encourage the comparative study of the common law and the civil law systems in China. These students will spend one year in the Faculty, supported by scholarships, to familiarise themselves with the common law system, how decisions are made by judges and how judgments and legal principles evolve and develop. At the end of the academic year, some of these students will join the summer internship organised by the Judiciary to put into practice what they have learned. The experience of teaching students from a completely different jurisdiction can be quite rewarding. Some MCL graduates told our teachers that, back in their courts, they are now writing longer judgments because they see the importance of judicial reasoning in deciding cases, and the reasoning has to be open to scrutiny and debate. Some of them said that they are now sitting through longer trials as they believe both sides of a case have the right to be heard (even if the prosecution is the government authorities) whereas in the past the prosecution, usually the government authorities, would be assumed to be correct. Some other graduates have followed the common law tradition to collate the decisions of administrative/ regulatory bodies and publish them as official records so that they can be used as guidance for future references. Graduates who are academics have written more on the comparative study between common law and civil law, and some of them have published on common law. They may well be individual instances, but they represent the seeds that we have planted in the Mainland legal system, and we trust that in time the seeds will grow to their full bloom. By 2009, the Faculty has trained over 500 judges, government officials, and scholars/graduates from the Mainland through our MCL programmes. Many others came as short-term visitors, and the Faculty admits about 10 undergraduate Mainland students each year through the Mainland matriculation system from a pool of about 12,000 applicants. Cover Story 9