Last week, I presented this paper at the East Asia Law & Society Conference in Shanghai.
With grateful appreciation to Park Dam, LLB, summa cum laude, Handong University, 2013, for her excellent research and editorial assistance.
Introduction
Nearly ten years ago I was presenting a paper in the United States at an academic symposium much like the one at which we are gathered today. I was addressing a group of legal scholars on the subject of recent US Supreme Court decisions in cases involving capital punishment. I was not aware, however, that in my audience were two professors from the faculty of Handong University located in Korea. After my talk, those Korean professors introduced themselves and invited me to their university’s recently established graduate law school to serve as a visiting professor for a short term teaching U.S. Antitrust law the following summer. I accepted their invitation and traveled to East Asia for the first time in July, 2004. That experience led to my subsequent return to Handong in the fall of 2009 and my eventual appointment to the university’s faculty of law where I have since then been teaching in their U.S. and International Law program of study. This spring term marks my seventh semester teaching American law in an Asian university.
Through my teaching experiences over this period of time, I have encountered much of what Professor Jasper Kim of Ehwa University described in his article entitled: “Socrates vs. Confucius: An Analysis of South Korea’s Implementation of the American Law School Model” published in the Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal in 2009. There, Professor Kim addressed the question: “Socrates vs. Confucius: clash or co-existence?” (323). His inquiry was focused upon South Korea’s Graduate Law School Act of 2007 by which Korea has transitioned from an undergraduate legal education system to a program of study modeled along the lines of the three-year graduate, professional law school program in the United States (323).
Professor Kim identified both cultural constraints and language barriers to the successful co-existence of a Socratic-styled Western legal educational approach within the Confucian context in which Korean legal education, both substantively and methodologically, is located. With respect to cultural constraints, Prof. Kim observed:
Korean culture is predominantly predicated on social inequality while American culture is predicated on equality, and accordingly the American law school system is largely predicated on the use of the Socratic method [sic] rather than the South Korean Confucian-based top-down lecture method. Thus, a fundamental mismatch may exist in the short-run when applying the American law school model to the Korean case (349).
Second, with regard to language barriers, Prof. Kim noted that the English language embodies the fundamental notion of equality and thus it is “relatively non-hierarchical and flat” when contrasted with the Korean language (349). As a result, he predicted that there would be more clash and less peaceful co-existence between Socrates and Confucius at least in the first stages of Korea’s implementation of American model of legal education.
While readily acknowledging the accuracy of most of Prof. Kim’s analysis as well as the validity of nearly all his conclusions, I come today to the question of Confucius’ encounter with Socrates in the arena of legal education both from a different perspective and with a distinct task. Rather than expand upon an evaluation of attempts to teach Asian Law through a Western educational model, I will attempt instead to assess the experiences of a Westerner teaching American law in an Asian university. Based upon my analysis, I will suggest in this paper that Socrates may indeed not only co-exist with Confucius, but also, that their relationship has the potential to produce a mutually thriving learning environment. This may occur when Confucius greets Socrates and together they learn from one another how better to relate to their students, to improve their pedagogy and to envision and achieve their learning objectives.
Professor – Student Relationship
The first way in which Confucius may greet Socrates is in the understanding of the relationship between professor and students. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus upon just two aspects: attitude and engagement. Both the Confucian hierarchical and the Socratic equalitarian character of this relationship are founded upon and fostered by an attitude of respect. In the Asian context, it is an immediate, one might say innate, respect owed to the professor by the students due to the professor’s status as a teacher. In contrast, respect in a Western law school setting is initiated by the professor’s addressing his or her students by their surnames. This is exemplified in the popular film “The Paper Chase.” The opening scene depicts the first day of class for first year students at Harvard Law School. Professor Kingsfield calls upon Mr. Hart, not James or even James Hart, but Mr. Hart, to recite the facts of the first case. American law students have entered the professional arena by earning admission to law school and professional courtesy is practiced by the law professor’s attitude of respect for his students. I have found that addressing my law students at Handong by their family names – Ms. Park, Mr. Han – fosters an authenticity of respect that is sometimes lacking when the respect is merely culturally conditioned.
Furthermore, mutuality of respect between professor and students engenders a greater openness to engagement by the students in the subject matter of the day’s class. Student engagement emerges beyond respectful, passive listening and vigorous note-taking, characteristic of the Confucian learning tradition, to a more active willingness to pose questions, not only privately to the professor after the class, but even publicly during the class itself. In order to draw students into this more active engagement, I have found that it was necessary for me to reiterate regularly both my willingness to be interrupted by questions and my approval of students who ask questions during class as those who are indeed listening carefully and wanting to know and understand the subject matter more thoroughly.
Teaching Methodology
An integrated Confucian-Socratesian attitude of respect in the relationship between professor and students flows naturally into the forming of an integrated pedagogy. Both Confucian and Socratesian teaching methodologies are in their essential form founded upon the pondering of a text through the aid of guided inquiry. The Socratic Method, that is virtually synonymous with Western legal education, however, turns the approach away from the professor’s thoughts on the case under consideration, to the students’ thinking about the facts, issues, rules and rationales of the case. Their thinking is guided by the law professor’s queries. A student’s response to the professor’s opening question will lead to another question from the professor, the reply to which will provide the basis for yet another question, and so goes the interaction within the Socratic classroom. For a further elucidation of this correspondence, I recommend Warwick University Professor Abdul Paliwala’s article, Socrates and Confucius: A Long History of Information Technology in Legal Education published in 2010.
The professor seeks to hone the students’ thinking skills more than he or she attempts to convey substantive knowledge. Once the students’ initial hesitancy to respond is overcome by the professor’s openness to their efforts and once the students’ reluctance to speak up due to a lack of confidence in his or her language skills is relieved by the professor’s acceptance of their attempts, the Socratic Method may be effectively used to heighten the Asian law students’ active engagement in the learning endeavor. Indeed, the Confucian methodology that seeks to evoke reflection upon the text may be enhanced as the professor incorporates the Socratesian pedagogy by framing inquiries with a more artful aim and in more inviting tones. In this way, Confucius greets and invites Socrates into the seowon, thus moving toward a merger of the Eastern and Western legal academy.
Learning Outcomes
An integrated Confucian-Socratesian characterization of the professor-student relationship founded upon respect, along with a similarly integrated pedagogy encouraging thoughtful engagement of the legal text through guided inquiry, culminates in more holistic learning outcomes. The transformation of legal educational objectives that was engendered by the adoption of the Socratic-case study approach at the “high citadel” of Harvard Law School at the turn of the Twentieth Century marked the move from merely “learning the law” to the ultimate goal of producing graduates who are “thinking like a lawyer.” This momentous shift in American legal education was thoroughly analyzed by Michigan Law Professor Joel Seligman in his 1978 book, The High Citadel.
Sharpening legal practitioners’ critical thinking skills and argumentative tactics did not, however, fully form a professional with developed sense of responsibility and ethics. As a result, most law schools in America included in their curriculum required courses in professional responsibility and humanities. During my law school days at Saint Louis University, I met the humanities requirement by taking a seminar examining the inter-relationship of law and religion. Some law schools in the States, most notably Yale Law School, went so far as to develop an entire course on the “formation of the lawyer” and also offered a dual-degree program in cooperation with the university’s Divinity School that enabled the student to earn both a Juris Doctorate and a Masters of Divinity degree during five years of study.
What Western, Socratic legal education realized as a need was, in fact, an outcome that the Confucian educational tradition always embodied – the formation of a whole person. These “learning virtues” of the East were recently emphasized in the February 28, 2013 New York Times article by David Brooks. There he reviewed the work of Professor Jin Li in her book Cultural Foundations of Education: East and West. Prof. Li’s study concluded, among other things, that:
Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.
Here again, the integration achieved by Confucius welcoming Socrates, and Socrates, in turn, appreciating and learning from Confucius yields both a fuller and deeper commitment to educational outcomes that aim, not only, at finely-honed analytical skills and argumentative strategies, but also a developed sense of professional responsibility and ethical alertness that enables the law school graduate both to think like a lawyer and to act like attorney. The outcomes of individual courses of study as well as the entire legal education endeavor will be envisioned in terms of forming a whole person capable of ably engaging the external demands and challenges of the legal profession with ethical integrity.
When Confucius greets Socrates and both value and learn from one another, then they may grow into better relationships with their students based upon mutual respect. They may improve their pedagogy by engaging their students in reflection upon the legal text through open, guided inquiries that shape the students’ approach to thinking about the law and finally, Confucius and Socrates may help to envision and achieve learning outcomes that more fully form competent and responsible legal professionals. This integration of the Confucian and Socratesian approaches has the potential to foster a thriving legal-learning environment. I have found this to be the case in my experience of teaching American law in an Asian university.
