Professor Jack Beermann Joins US-China Legal Experts Dialogue
Beermann partook in the US State Department’s mission to discuss legal matters of interest to the US and China.
In October, Harry Elwood Warren Scholar and Professor of Law Jack Beermann traveled to China as a Member of the US State Department’s Delegation to a US-China Legal Experts Dialogue. The two-day event brought together government officials and legal experts from both countries to discuss legal issues concerning China and the US. The US delegation was led by Assistant Secretary for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Tom Malinowski, and the Chinese delegation was co-led by Liu Hua, special representative for human rights at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Yan Maokun of the Supreme People’s Court.
Over the last several years, Professor Beermann has provided his legal knowledge and scholarship to help the Chinese government reform the country’s administrative laws. He has attended several conferences and forums in China with other legal scholars as well as government officials.
On the first day of the dialogue, representatives of the US and China met at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing to discuss and debate various legal issues that China is facing, such as the use of force by police in the criminal justice system, and the regulation of non-profit organizations. Beermann’s primary topic of discussion was how administrative law can be used to improve interactions between government and citizens. “The Chinese government is in the middle of rewriting major administrative statutes,” he says. “We were pushing reform aimed at increasing the rule of law and improving administrative decision-making.” The Chinese government is very interested in making China’s administrative law system function more efficiently.
The issue of lawyer access to clients prompted an especially heated discussion among Chinese and US government officials and scholars. In China, lawyers often do not have sufficient access to their clients, and the country has recently seen several arrests of lawyers. American legal experts urged Chinese officials to grant lawyers greater access to their clients.
The second day of the dialogue consisted of a series of site visits in Beijing. Beermann visited the All China Bar Association, where he joined in another discussion about the difficulties that lawyers face in China. The discussion was wide-ranging, including a general history of the development of the legal profession in post-1948 China. The group also stopped at a police station, where Beermann and the others learned about interrogation techniques used by Chinese police officers. Interestingly, most police officers in China do not carry firearms and all activity inside the station is subject to video monitoring by central authorities.
Beermann then went to the Law Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences, where he met with a group of Chinese legal academics with expertise across many subject areas. This was a return visit for Beermann, as he presented an academic paper there in 2002 while he was teaching in Beijing.
Professor Beermann also met with separately with a pair of leading Chinese administrative law scholars. First, he met with with the Vice President of China University of Political Sciences and Law, Ma Huaide—a legal scholar who studied American Administrative Law with Beermann at BU Law in 1995—and then with Zhou Hanau, a senior researcher in the Academy of Social Science’s law division. Zhou recently helped draft China’s regulations on ridesharing companies such as Uber and Lyft. Similar to what is happening in the US, China’s taxi cab companies are suffering due to competition from unregulated ride-sharing firms. Beermann will be presenting Zhou’s findings in January when he moderates an American Bar Association program on regulation of the sharing economy in the United States.
Beermann’s first visit to China was in 2002 when he taught Administrative Law to the faculty and doctoral students at the China University of Political Science and Law. He returned in August 2013 to attend a workshop on improving China’s licensing and permitting system. He returned again to Beijing in June 2014 for a conference on reforms to China’s administrative litigation law. Beermann has also worked with the Administrative Conferences of the US to aid its efforts in improving administrative systems both domestically and abroad.
“Participating in dialogues and conferences in China is extremely interesting because you see law through a perspective you might never otherwise encounter,” Beermann says. Since the country has an open economic system but a closed political system, “the big issue is whether and how China will implement the rule of law.”
Reported by Johanna Gruber (CAS’17)