Event

Professor Lubman reviews the problems that law reform has encountered since the millennium, especially emphasizing the continuing tightness of control by the Party-State over the courts, the extensive power of local governments over local courts and the enforcement of central government laws and regulations (e.g., in failing to control food safety and hampering the application of environmental regulations), and the lack of improvement in the criminal process. He will also call attention to improvements in administrative law.

Stanley Lubman has specialized on China as a scholar and as a practicing lawyer for almost 50 years. He first taught at Berkeley from 1967-1974, and returned in 2002. In the meantime, he taught at Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, the University of Heidelberg, and the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

Lubman has advised American, European and Japanese clients on the People's Republic of China since 1972 on a wide range of matters, and he has also represented clients in disputes arbitrated by the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission in Beijing. From 1978 to 1997 he headed the China practices at two major San Francisco law firms and a large English firm of solicitors. Since 1997 he has devoted his time to scholarly research, teaching and non-profit activities. He also writes an online column that appears regularly on China Real Time Report-the Wall Street Journal http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/. 

He was advisor on China legal projects to The Asia Foundation from 2001 to 2011. In that capacity, he organized committees of U.S. experts to consult with Chinese counterparts. And worked on a number of law reform projects in China related to administrative procedure

He was trained as a China specialist in the United States and in Hong Kong for four years (1963-67) under grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Columbia University, and the Foreign Area Fellowship Program. He has an A.B. degree with honors in history from Columbia College and LL.B., LL.M., and J.S.D. degrees from the Columbia Law School. He has also studied at the Faculty of Law and the Institute of Comparative Law of the University of Paris.

His writings on Chinese law and related subjects have been widely published and include China's Legal Reforms (Lubman, ed.), Oxford University Press, 1996; Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China after Mao, Stanford University Press, 2000; Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice (co-edited with Neil J. Diamant and Kevin O'Brien, Stanford University Press 2005), and The Evolution of Law Reform in China: Pursuing an Uncertain Path, Elgar Publishing, forthcoming, 2012.