University Legal Education Must Be Reformed

A few years ago I heard this story firsthand: while a prosecutor was investigating a theft case, the defendant confessed, "I stole an excavator, drove it onto a big truck, and hauled it all the way to Kaohsiung..." Before the defendant could finish, the prosecutor suddenly slammed the table and accused him: "You're lying! An excavator can move on its own; why would you need a truck to carry it!" I thought that "joke" was outrageous enough, but the other day a senior lawyer told me that a few years ago, in a traffic accident case, the complainant explained how the accident happened: "I saw a ten-wheel truck charging toward us..." To everyone's surprise, the judge also slammed the table and accused the complainant: "Nonsense! Everyone knows cars have only four wheels; where would a ten-wheeled vehicle come from!" These two "jokes" have two things in common: first, judges and prosecutors a few years ago seemed to love scolding people; second, they had too little life experience and seemed to lack common sense. But don't think these jokes are exceptions; they are the tip of the iceberg, revealing that university legal education in Taiwan has many problems.

The shortcomings of current university legal education can be summed up in five points. First, exams drive teaching: fierce competition in the national bar and judicial examinations heavily influences how students learn, fueling a booming cram-school culture and a utilitarian attitude of studying nothing but exam subjects. Second, university legal education has been hollowed out: closely related to the national exams, students do not study what is not tested, naturally skewing legal education. Third, teachers generally lack practical experience, and course content does not meet society's needs: most law professors today lack practical experience; with backgrounds of study abroad, they are often good at researching foreign legal systems and doctrinal analysis but unfamiliar with domestic legislative policy and practice, and can hardly meet students' needs once they enter the workforce. Fourth, students are too young and lack life experience: students entering university law programs are typically only eighteen or nineteen; not only can their prior learning not help them understand abstract legal concepts, but their simple (meager) social lives do not help them learn all kinds of complex legal relationships, leaving them with poor critical thinking and an excessively rule-bound, instrumental mindset. Fifth, and in my view most serious, legal education as a whole lacks an internal value system: as a country that has received foreign law, values deeply rooted in advanced countries may be hotly contested in Taiwan without consensus. If legal professionals adopt them wholesale without reflection, they may end up saying one thing and doing another, with confused values, and even be criticized by outsiders for always "turning black into white" and "twisting right and wrong."

In my view, the shortcomings of Taiwan's university legal education can be addressed in at least the following ways. First, thoroughly reform the national examination system: improve how questions are set, so that students do not focus only on the idiosyncratic views of the examiners (the so-called "secret weapons") while neglecting basic legal concepts; adopt objective standards for answers to ensure fairness and credibility; and lower the passing threshold of the bar exam, relying instead on strict periodic license review as the gatekeeper, so as to normalize legal education. Second, improve faculty and teaching methods: recruit talent from legal practice, pay attention to social trends, and strengthen research capacity in policy analysis. Third, transform undergraduate law departments into post-baccalaureate law schools: drawing on the American law school model, admit more mature students with more life experience to cultivate legal professionals with broad vision. Fourth, establish an internal value system. Fifth, establish a sound evaluation system to improve teaching quality.

As one can imagine, the biggest key to judicial reform is "people," and legal education is the most important arena for training "legal professionals." If judicial reform is to succeed, reform of university legal education and the national examinations must not be neglected. Only then can we produce the legal professionals society expects, rather than ones who merely "make jokes of themselves."

* Published in the China Times.