Tian Wenchang: China's legal profession has entered a development period, and the most acute challenge it faces is specialization
2024-08-26
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"The Chinese legal profession has entered a development period." From August 24 to 25, the 2024 National Youth Criminal Defense Lawyer Forum and Youth Training Camp was held in Beijing. Tian Wenchang, honorary director of Beijing Jingdu Law Firm and honorary dean of the Criminal Defense Advanced Research Institute of Northwest University of Political Science and Law, said that the Chinese legal system has gone through more than 40 years since its restoration and reconstruction in 1979. This is the formation period of the Chinese legal system. Now, the Chinese legal system has entered a development period, and the most acute challenge it faces is the professionalization of the legal profession.
The 2024 National Young Criminal Defense Lawyers Forum focused on the growth difficulties faced by young criminal defense lawyers, and Tian Wenchang, honorary director of Beijing Kyoto Law Firm, delivered a speech.
Tian Wenchang believes that because Chinese lawyers have no inheritance and history, the development of the legal profession in the past 40 years has shown rapid development like mushrooms after rain. But on the other hand, it is also in a disorderly state. All the predecessors are groping forward and have never achieved professionalization of the legal profession.
However, in stark contrast to the lack of professionalization in the legal profession, the number of Chinese lawyers has continued to rise. Data shows that over the past decade, the number of Chinese lawyers has increased from 300,000 to 725,000.
How can lawyers achieve specialization? Tian Wenchang believes that lawyers should have a strong theoretical foundation on the one hand, and receive more professional skills training on the other. "In addition to understanding the ins and outs of the law, lawyers should also focus on learning legal principles, principles, and concepts, understand the knowledge of related disciplines, and receive professional skills training. Through a participatory training model, practical training, drills, and comments are organically combined, so that through self-exposure, problems are discovered, and solutions are found, so that one's criminal defense skills can be systematically improved." He believes that the combination of theory and practice can help one embark on the path of specialization of criminal defense skills more quickly.
In recent years, the "involution" of the legal profession and the "saturation" of the legal profession have become hot topics of public discussion. The issue of the growth of young lawyers has attracted widespread attention from the outside world, and the career development of young criminal defense lawyers is even more of a pain point and difficulty in the industry.
"What problems do criminal defense lawyers have to solve? First of all, we have to solve the problem of combining theory with practice, the integration of related disciplines, and the combination of procedural law and substantive law in our knowledge structure. Only in this way can we really lay a solid theoretical foundation." Tian Wenchang emphasized that an important problem that criminal defense still needs to solve is the theoretical problem. "For many years, there has been a view, even a relatively common view, that there is no theory in criminal defense. Some people even say that it is a skilled job that anyone can do."
What is even more incredible is that in the legal profession, there is a popular view that IPO business and foreign-related business are high-end business, and criminal defense business is low-end business. "Criminal defense is about the most important rights and interests of human beings - the right to freedom and the right to life. It goes without saying which one is the high-end business." Tian Wenchang said.
He also said that criminal defense is both a science and an art, and science needs theoretical support, so it not only needs the theory of legal knowledge, but also the theory of criminal defense as a foundation. "The development of young Chinese lawyers, especially young criminal defense lawyers, must lay a solid theoretical foundation and do a good job of skill training."
The Paper noted that as one of the few professional forums in China focusing on the vertical track of young criminal defense lawyers, this event invited more than 200 young lawyers from more than 16 provinces across the country to attend the forum, focusing on the professional growth of young criminal defense lawyers, and discussing how to improve their own professional qualities and influence in the context of the new era, as well as cutting-edge topics such as artificial intelligence’s impact on the business expansion of young criminal defense lawyers.
Thepaper.cn reporter Lin Ping
(This article is from The Paper. For more original information, please download the "The Paper" APP)
