Harvard Law School Pushes Ahead With Plans To Open Beijing Campus

Despite a shrinking budget and cost overruns, Harvard Law School will push forward with a plan to open two satellite campuses in the growing global hotspots of Beijing and Dubai. The move follows other universities, Georgetown, NYU, and Yale, which have moved aggressively to open facilities in countries outside the United States and more traditional study abroad locations, like Europe.

"In order to understand an increasingly globalized world, and one in which American values are often mistakenly neglected, our students need exposure to these rapidly growing economies and the illiberal, subtly authoritarian legal structures that hold them together," said Vice Dean for Extraterritorial Expansion Manny Faust D. Steny. Beijing and Dubai were chosen for their increasing prominence as sites of legal careers.

In coming months, HLS may open more satellite campuses, in cities like Moscow and Singapore. "We thought it would be fascinating to shed light on Singapore’s unique culture of laissez-faire finance fused with public bloodletting for minor misdemeanors," said Dean Steny. "It really illuminates how students will better understand our own country’s violations of human rights protocols in light of foreign flavors of brutality". It was a shame, he admitted, that the Singapore campus could not open sooner.

Still, he expressed hope that students would find plenty to fascinate them in the legal orders of China and the UAE. "Where else in the world do you have a law column," in the local paper, asked Dean Steny, holding a copy of Dubai’s Gulf News. He pointed to readers’ letters, asking how long Islamic Law stipulated that they wait for their mail-order Pakistani brides to be "housebroken" before they could be properly beaten. "This is a fascinating…um, window into a different way of life," Dean Steny said after reading the column aloud, before quickly changing the subject to the UAE’s accession to various international treaties.