CO129-527-18 University of Hong Kong- proposal to establish Department 28-5-1930 - 19-9-1930 — Page 38

A

MEMORANDUM

By Lionel Curtis.

37

Last October while attending the Pacific Conference at Kyoto I received an invitation from the Municipal Council of the International Settlement at Shanghai to come there and advise them on their political position; and this I agreed to do. The International Settlement is the outcome of extraterritorial rights; but the authority of the Council largely depends on the Chinese court which deals with cases in which Chinese are defendants. I therefore pointed out to the Council that they needed an adviser who had not only legal but also judicial experience. On my advice they secured the services of Judge Foetham from South Africa. I met him at Hongkong, brought him to Shanghai and spent a month there with him examining the whole position. We saw that the problem of extraterritoriality is created by the fact that foreigners with scientific ideas of law are living and trading with a quarter of the human race whose legal notions have not reached the stage which Europe had reached even in the dark ages. The problem of extra- territoriality of which the International Settlement is one aspect, will not be in reach of final solution until there are in China enough men trained to administer courts on lines compatible with modern industry and commerce. The universities founded by missionary and other foreign influences have long been teaching engineering, medicine and other branches of physical science, but have strangely neglected the study of law.

At this juncture there came to us from Japan Mr. Masujima a Japanese lawyer trained at the Middle Temple. At his own charge he conducts a school of English law in Tokyo and sends young Japanese to study law at the Inns of Court. Judging from his own experience in Japan he said that the greatest need of China was legal education on English lines "what we need in the Far East" he said "is missionaries I don't mean religious missionaries but legal missionaries". He dwelt on the fact that the Inns of Court were the sources from which had sprung those scientific notions of English law which in his view were more necessary even than knowledge of physical science, if China is to be brought into any coherent relation with the other three quarters of the human race. Was it, he asked, impossible, that the Inns of Courts should take an interest in extending to China their great gift to the world, without which China's relations to the rest of the world would remain in chaos.

Judge Feetham has suggested that practical expression might be given to this idea if the Inns of Court could be interested in organising a first-rate school of law in the British Colony of Hongkong.

I have since received a letter from Mr.Hornell vice-Chancellor of the University of Hongkong strongly supporting the proposal.

Judge Feetham asks me to bring the matter to the attention of the following to whom he is personally known.