Peking University Law School

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CENTER FOR CLINICAL LEGAL EDUCATION OF PEKING UNVERSITY

Date：2014-09-23

Development History

The clinical legal education course of PKU began in October 2000, with the original intention of setting up a practical teaching course for legal talents training in new period. And the exterior background of this course is Ford Foundation endeavors to help top law schools in China with its fund, technology and idea to set up clinical legal education course and train students in this way. Peking University Law School is one of the first batch of seven law schools choosed by Ford Foundation. Through the early construction and development, the clinical legal education course of PKU goes well now and is well received by students.

In consideration of the scale of the course and the need of students, PKU Law School has raised credit of the course from 2 to 5 since 2007, which contains 3 optional course credits and 2 practical course credits. And the developing objects of the course include not only undergraduates but also graduate students now. So far our Law School has set up a standardized clinical Law education course, and we can train more than 40 students every semester.

In 2009, with the help of Ministry of Education and Beijing Municipal Education Commission, PKU Law School, Lab and Equipment Management Dept, Department of Society Science and Department of Educational Administration began to prepare to build the Legal Experiment Teaching Base of PKU based on the achievement and mature model of that course.

In May 2010, Under the vigorous promotion and cooperation of many partners, the Center for Clinical Legal Education of PKU was formally founded in PKU Law School. Since then, the Program of PKU Clinical Legal Experiment Teaching begins its software and hardware building at a higher and broader platform, developing Clinical Legal Courses in many types and domains, improving supporting facilities for experiment teaching like moot court and working place.

In May 2011, PKU Law School’s Ko Guan Building was enabled fully. With this progress, the Center for Clinical Legal Education of PKU has got a practical teaching space with hardware facilities available, which includes moot court, center for handling cases and case consulting room. And the Program of PKU Clinical Legal Experiment Teaching has began to walk down the path of text book research, course improvement, information construction and standardized management to perfect itself.

Up to the end of 2013, the Center for Clinical Legal Education of PKU has set this course for 27 sessions in all, and about 800 students have took part in clinical legal education here. Nearly 700 of them joined the hands-on training of lawsuits, other 90 students tried to draft laws and regulations for government and public service organizations with professional team. From our beginning to December 2013, students of this center provided free legal aid for the society, and had given counsel to more than 10000 parties by telephone, mail and interview, handled 261 legal aid cases, the winning rate of which is above 90%. The type of cases we accept mainly includes contract dispute, building property right relations, marriage and inheritance dispute, raise and support dispute, traffic accident, medical negligence, consumer protection, labor rights protection, land interest protection, administrative litigation and civil execution dispute etc. Students also take part in legislation and public policy program of government through this course, content of which involves feed additives management, advance payment of occupational injury, university education management, residential property management and labor dispatch system etc.

Cooperation and Communication

The Center for Clinical Legal Education of PKU has abundant resources of cooperation and communication. Our center has build cooperation with Yale Law School, the China Law Center of Yale, Harvard Law School, the Law Center of Georgetown University, Columbia Law School, New York University Law School and Oslo University Law School. We carry out interchange activities with many clinical legal education programs of universities in USA, Canada, Australia, Japan, Korea, Thailand, Poland and Hungary. And we cooperate with numbers of foundations and international public welfare legal organizations, such as Ford Foundation.

The effort above has provided clinical legal education of PKU with knowledge, experience and resource, which helps to promote the program a lot. At the same time, the domestic and international competitors also approve of the mode of ‘taking account of both case and system’ forming from clinical legal education programs of PKU.