If, like everyone else who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past twenty years, you think that legal training in China focuses too heavily on the acquisition of knowledge at the expense of practical training, you’d be absolutely correct.

Moreover, your opinions seem to be supported by legal educators, several of whom had a meeting this week to discuss the challenges facing law schools, and law students, in today’s economy.

Check out the Caijing reporting of the meeting (Chinese only — way too esoteric for anyone to actually translate this into English!).

Although the discussion was about such lofty issues as rule of law, the structure of legal education, and the need for reform to assist grads in this tough market environment, I noticed that the reporter/editor went with the following headline:

13 Universities Plan to Establish China Law School “Ivy League”

Suffice it to say that this was not the overarching theme of the discussion on the reform of legal education. It’s also a stupid idea for the following reasons:

1. The Ivy League is an anachronism in the U.S.;

2. The Ivy League is a symbol of selectivity, not of quality (depending on who you ask, of course, and no, I did not attend an Ivy League school);

3. The Ivy League is primarily a marketing strategy based on ancient history;

4. If you put 13 Chinese law schools into this group, there are not too many decent law schools left — kind of shoots down the whole “selectivity” marketing campaign.

FYI, in case you want to know who the 13 would be, and I know you do, here is a list taken directly from the Caijing article (not sure if it is in any particular order):

????? (Jiaotong University)

???? (Beijing University)

???? (Qinghua University)

?????? (People’s University)

???? (Zhejiang University)

???? (Nanjing University)

???? (Wuhan University)

???? (Fudan University)

???? (Jilin University)

???? (Shandong University)

???? (Xiamen University)

???? (Zhongshan University)

???? (Suzhou University)

Seems to be quite a few Beijing and dongbei schools missing from that South-heavy list (the meeting was held in Shanghai, by the way), but I suppose there’s a lot of room for debate.