YLS Students Engage Counterparts at Peking University Law School
During the 2022–23 academic year, students from the Paul Tsai China Center (PTCC) and Peking University (PKU) Law School continued a student-organized Joint Legal Dialogue Series.
Students from each law school selected discussion topics and led the dialogues, one in the fall and one in the spring. On the Yale Law School side, the dialogues were largely organized by Jerry Ma ’25, supported by PTCC Fellow Karman Lucero.
One such dialogue was held during the fall semester and one during the spring. Students found the dialogues particularly valuable — not only for the sake of comparative research on timely questions of interest, but also for the opportunity to organize their own means of engagement with counterparts in each country at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic and worsening U.S.-China relations made people-to-people exchanges difficult and rare.
During the fall term, delegations from Yale and PKU engaged in an exchange of ideas about monetary policy and financial regulation heading into the post-pandemic era. The dialogue was kicked off by a Paul Tsai China Center Fellow selected by students and enlivened by a sophisticated knowledge of developing law and policy as well as the sharing of lived experiences in both the United States and China, as participants were able to hear directly from each other about the day-to-day realities on the ground.
The spring term dialogue was kicked off by a PKU Law professor selected by students and focused on the changing dynamics of platform regulation in the United States and China. Students shared their concerns about the power of internet platforms, the need for — but also limits of — law to address social problems created by new internet technologies, and their differing normative views regarding the future of social media platforms. The conversation particularly benefited from students sharing their personal attempts at utilizing the transparency and accountability mechanisms afforded by new laws and regulations to better understand how internet platforms are utilizing data and interacting with their users.
