International Conference on Legal Education Reform: Reflections and Perspectives

Legal education is key to the success of every legal system, which, in turn, is the foundation of every society. Legal education should therefore be reviewed on a continuous basis so as to stay consistent with the development of society. However, the current legal education system in Taiwan has been in place for many decades without fundamental change, even though Taiwan has played an active part in globalization and faces keen competition from around the world. Considering this background, my colleague, Professor Mingjye Huang, and I initiated a legal education reform plan in 2004, and stepped up these efforts in 2005. The International Conference on Legal Education Reform: Reflections and Perspectives, held on September 16 and 17, 2005, was arranged as part of the reform project. Although there had already been many international conferences on legal education held in Taiwan, there had not been one arranged as part of the legal education reform plan, to closely examine the legal education reforms in other countries and evaluate the possible models to be taken into account when formulating Taiwan’s own reform. We believed that the new law schools established in Japan in 2004 were an important development, one that we should carefully consider. We also noted Korea’s proposed legal education reform, to be implemented in 2008, and the way in which the proposed reform included elements of American-style law schools. We were also interested in the details of legal education systems in other jurisdictions, including Singapore and Germany. We thought the need to properly evaluate the different systems in light of reforming Taiwan’s system would best be met through an international conference arranged specifically for that purpose.