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Lawyer Discipline In An Authoritarian Regime: Empirical Insights From Zhejiang Province, China, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Benjamin Van Rooij, Sida Liu Oct 2017

Lawyer Discipline In An Authoritarian Regime: Empirical Insights From Zhejiang Province, China, Judith A. Mcmorrow, Benjamin Van Rooij, Sida Liu

Judith A. McMorrow

On paper the state-run lawyer disciplinary system in China serves multiple interests: client protection, maintaining the reputation of the legal profession, upholding the rule of law, and safeguarding the party-state authority. This Article assesses which of these interests dominates in the lawyer disciplinary process by analyzing 122 published lawyer discipline cases from Zhejiang Province from 2007-2015. These records of lawyer discipline evidence an authoritarian political logic of attorney discipline, with punishment most clearly serving to safeguard the Communist Party's rule by keeping lawyers in bounds and tightly tied to their law firms. Subordinate to this are other state interests such …


Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow Oct 2011

Professional Responsibility In An Uncertain Profession: Legal Ethics In China, Judith A. Mcmorrow

Judith A. McMorrow

The rapidly expanding Chinese legal profession provides an extraordinary opportunity for the U.S. legal profession to test U.S. assumptions about legal ethics. This essay examines challenges facing Chinese legal education and the Chinese legal profession as it develops norms of legal ethics. This essay examines this process from the law school and law student’s perspective about legal ethics, and then briefly explores the effort to create norms of attorney conduct from a top-down perspective. Both a bottom-up and top-down view show the tremendous challenges facing the emerging Chinese legal culture in building a coherent model of lawyering that can serve …