ABSTRACT
Introduction Since establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, orientation toward law has been, to say the least, extremely volatile, with law and legal institutions initially reconstituted as part of construction of a revolutionary polity, then demeaned and destroyed. After the Cultural Revolution, the legal system was reconstructed again under the program of ‘governance according to law’ (yifa zhiguo 依法治国). Legal education has the very practical purpose of underpinning the related programs of economic modernization and governance according to law. As Keyuan Zou notes, ‘[w]ithout the development of legal education, the rule of law would be no more than an empty word.’1
