Classes are over. Exams are finished. No cite-checking assignments due. Only a Comment to finish for the law journal. In a memo to myself I discovered that, in school, one does not procrastinate when one learns. Thus it was that I found myself wracked with guilt for not cracking open my folio of case law, statutes, and journal articles, and banging out a few pages of Comment, when all of a sudden I stumbled across a law journal article kindly linked to by good Dan Harris at China Law Blog, "Wahaha as Pedagogy" by Micah Schwalb of Boulder2Beijing. I have yet to develop the "aversion," and Wahaha, as Mr. Schwalb argues, can serve as an adequate diversion for a student of Chinese legislation. It may also have occurred to me that a post could possibly be divined from this article perusal.
Mr Schwalb's thesis is that a whole introductory course on Chinese Company Law and foreign direct investment in China could be taught out of the Danone-Wahaha controversy. The majority of the fourteen pages are spent showing how this could be done. This instructive part of the paper read like a primer on Company Law; I felt like I was back in our arctic-chill classroom at Jiao Tong University learning the statutes governing foreign direct investment. Truly a great resource for seeing how these many laws fit together and play out in a dispute.
But, Mr. Schwalb had another agenda that he reveals in his blog post: to teach Chinese law in a new manner. Rather than "sitting through slide presentations about specific code provisions" (it takes ~3 hours to read all 219 articles of the Company Law out loud word for word in English, trust me on this one), Mr. Schwalb suggests incorporating the case study method into a course. Danone-Wahaha serves as a great case for a Company Law course because, "with a few exceptions, ... [it] literally encompasses the entirety of Chinese company law".
I heartily agree. In a civil law system the ultimate authority rests with the statute and the statute is the most important thing to learn, but it is difficult to comprehend the importance of individual articles without seeing them applied and challenged. I have a couple of friends in medical school at UC San Diego and we often discuss our educational experiences. The aspect of law school that they find most intriguing is lacking in medical school: case study. They learn the chemistry and the biology and the physics and the pharmacology and the names of body parts, but the closest they come to a case study is an episode of House. They worry that the lack of case studies hurts them as future healers by depriving them of education on the application of their knowledge (at least until they are in residency and thrown to the wolves).
The majority of our law professors at Jiao Tong incorporated some aspect of case study into their lessons, but the professors who did not hurt their students because a statute by itself is difficult digest without seeing how it works. I hope they take Mr. Schwalb's recommendations to heart, for a lot can be learned about Chinese Company Law from Danone and Wahaha.
As it turns out, the thing I find most intriguing about medical school happens to be lacking in law school: cadaver dissections.
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