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Just at that time, the Rockefeller Foundation was urgently seeking someone to study the law of the People’s Republic of China, something no Western lawyer had ever undertaken. Recognizing the potential importance of U.S.-China relations and, more important, the challenge of such a unique and exciting opportunity, Professor Cohen decided to accept the Foundation’s invitation. In 1960, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, Professor Cohen began to study the Chinese language and embarked on what many believed to be an ill-advised endeavor to grasp the intricacies of Chinese law. What no one foresaw at the time was how generations of lawyers and legal scholars, many of whom Professor Cohen was to teach personally, would follow in his bold footsteps.
Tackling his research task with characteristic energy and enthusiasm, Professor Cohen quickly established himself as the leading expert on Chinese law in the Western world. His first major breakthrough came in the form of a one-year fieldwork stint in Hong Kong between 1963 and 1964, where he interviewed refugees from mainland China and researched other materials in an effort to map out the legal system of a closed-off country. Published by Harvard University Press in 1968 as The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1963: An Introduction, the results of that study represent a major, path-breaking achievement in American scholarship on Chinese law.
In the meantime, Professor Cohen had moved to become a faculty member at Harvard Law School, where he stayed for twenty-five years from 1964 to 1989, serving as its Associate Dean between 1975 and 1978. The presence of Professor Cohen at Harvard Law School, as well as the East Asian Legal Studies program (EALS) he founded there in 1965 and directed until 1981, made Harvard Law School the Mecca of Chinese legal studies in the Western hemisphere. That the contributors to this volume, all major scholars of Chinese law, have all been -- in one way or another -- associated with Harvard Law School and/or EALS is strong testimony to Professor Cohen’s unparalleled impact on Chinese legal studies in the United States and beyond.
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