Earlier this year, we were saddened to hear of the passing of Professor Fang Liufang, a renowned scholar of civil and commercial law and a founding Dean of the China-EU School of Law at China University of Political Science and Law. Professor Fang contributed much to the EALS community, as a visiting researcher and co-author with Professor Bill Alford, and as a Visiting Professor in winter 2009, when he co-taught an advanced course on Chinese law with Professor Shen Yuanyuan (Zhejiang University Law School and Boston College Law School). Professors Alford and Shen would like to share the note below, which will be published as part of a collection of tributes to Professor Fang.
We want to write this tribute to Professor Fang Liufang together as he was so dear a friend and so treasured a colleague to us both and we greatly enjoyed our time with him and his beloved wife Zhang Youwen.
Thinking of Professor Fang brings a smile to our faces, even as we are saddened by his passing. In a world in which too many people take positions out of convenience, he was uncompromising in the best sense – dare we say “stubborn” – when he thought something to be important.
Yuanyuan fondly remembers his willingness decades ago, when they both were young faculty members, to push back with school leadership when he thought principle called for it. So, too, she recalls the care with which he introduced ideas from foreign law that he thought worthy of consideration in China, such as the right, vindicated in the 1964 US Supreme Court case of Sullivan v. New York Times, to criticize public figures. And she notes the same qualities were evident in how he taught, including the course they did together at Harvard soon after the turn of the century – even if at times it led to his scrambling to meet external deadlines.
Bill remembers vividly his first collaboration with Professor Fang – on a report almost 30 years ago for the World Bank on the state of Chinese legal education — a document in which Professor Fang was determined to map out clearly respects in which he thought it needed to be improved. Professor Fang later got the chance to put some of those ideas into practice when he was invited to be the founding dean of the EU-China law school at the China University of Politics and Law. And then there was Professor Fang’s 2004 article entitled “Taking Academic Games Seriously,” in which he took issue with famed legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin’s essay “Taking Rights Seriously in Beijing” for what Fang thought to be his naivete.
To be sure, Fang’s determined stances did not always lead to the outcome he would have wanted. Institutional obstacles on both the PRC and EU sides ultimately kept the joint law school from achieving the dreams he had for it. And his criticism of Dworkin stirred criticism directed toward him (even as it also formed the basis of the single best exam question in Bill’s four decades of teaching).
In the end, Fang Liufang was true to himself, true to his wonderful family (including his beloved mother, his dear wife, and his extraordinary daughter), true to his students and friends, and true to what he believed crucial for the development of law and legal education in China. We like to think that Fang, trained initially as a doctor in traditional Chinese medicine, exemplified a physician’s commitment to taking a holistic approach and prescribing what he genuinely thought was needed for a sound outcome. He will be sorely missed.
Bill Alford and Shen Yuanyuan
December 2024