Shen Bin (www.gmw.cn):
Can you imagine professors of medicine not doing surgery or seeing patients and then becoming qualified teachers? Do you believe that training by such a professor could produce qualified doctors? If the new law makes it impossible for law professors to appear in court, do you think they will be able to train good lawyers?
Professionals like lawyers and doctors require both specialist knowledge and rich experience. Students need to learn from professors’ practical experience as well as from books. If a professor of criminal law does not deal with criminal cases himself, he will not get to know problems that might crop up in judicial practice. Thus, he will be unable to impart to students knowledge of how to deal with such cases.
Some claim that it’s unfair to allow law professors to act as lawyers at the same time. Professors have a stable income and professional titles from universities, and they can also make money by acting as lawyers. This may be a little unfair to full-time professional lawyers. But anyway, this is not judicial corruption and will not lead to judicial injustice.
If it’s unfair for law professors to be lawyers at the same, it’s also unfair for judges and professional lawyers to be part-time university professors. Actually, many law professors are also famous lawyers. For example, Professor Alan M. Dershowitz from Harvard Law School has acted as the criminal defense counsel in well-known cases, including the O. J. Simpson murder trial in 1995.
Of course, in every country, there are certain restrictions on law professors who act as lawyers at the same time, mostly to prevent the practice from affecting their normal teaching and education commitments. In China, the Law on Lawyers stipulates that professors must first obtain their university’s permission before they can act as lawyers.
China is trying to develop its rule of law, and it needs judicial practitioners who are good at both academic theory and practical work. Being a part-time lawyer provides a bridge between law theory and practice. The next step is to standardize this part-time business, not prohibit it. Barring law professors from judicial practice equates to banning medical professors from conducting surgery. This will not lead to what we want to see.