A Special Standing in the World : A History of the Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong

Descriptive copy The Faculty of Law at the University of Hong Kong is one of the cornerstones of the rule of law in Hong Kong. Established in 1969, when Hong Kong was little more than a colonial 'legal backwater', the Faculty has contributed widely to the transformation of Hong Kong into a flourishing and dynamic jurisdiction under 'one country, two systems', in which Hong Kong maintains its freedoms and its common law system as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. The Faculty has been instrumental in fostering a legal profession firmly rooted in Hong Kong and able to function bilingually in Chinese and English, a vital feature of Hong Kong's modern legal system. Its graduates now make up over half of Hong Kong's legal profession and over half of the Judiciary. Its teachers have played a key part in modernizing the law and establishing Hong Kong law as a field of scholarship. The Faculty is now a centre of research in a wide range of fields, from public law and human rights to financial law and comparative Chinese law. The history of the Faculty is therefore in many ways the history of the law and the legal profession in modern Hong Kong. Published to mark the Faculty's 50th anniversary in 2019, this book traces the history of the Faculty from its origins as a small Department of Law to its present position as one of the world's leading law schools. Drawing on archival materials, published sources, and interviews with teachers and alumni, the book explores the history of the Faculty in the context of Hong Kong's recent legal, political, and social history. The first two chapters examine the Faculty's long prehistory when, for over a hundred years, most of Hong Kong's lawyers had to go to England for their training. The remaining six chapters deal alternately with the internal history of the Faculty and its impact on the development of law during the most recent, often turbulent, fifty years of Hong Kong's history.