The death of Jerome Cohen last week at the age of 95 prompted a wave of tributes to the legendary professor of Chinese law. Outside legal circles, Cohen may have been best known for his involvement in the escape from China of legal activist Chen Guangcheng, and he was frequently and energetically outspoken in support of others suffering official repression in China. Besides frequently discussing their cases with reporters, he also embraced blogging [link currently inactive] , and in 2020 co-hosted a ten-part online seminar on “Law, Justice and Human Rights in China.”
At his China Heritage blog, Geremie Barmé translated a tribute from former Tsinghua University law professor Xu Zhangrun, whose mistreatment over his criticism of China’s COVID response was extensively chronicled at CDT, China Heritage, and on Cohen’s own blog.
Jerome Cohen enjoyed the longevity of a truly righteous man, however, following an extended illness he has now left us. His passing truly marks the end of an era. In what seems like another age, years ago Jerry Cohen, our master, ventured to this distant land of China to contribute his talent to the opening of that door, hopeful of being able to propagate the rule of law for the sake of broader public benefit.
[…] Since 2020, Professor Cohen resisted the challenges of the passage of time and remained energetically engaged in writing projects; he even found time to write about my plight on six separate occasions. He also advocated on my behalf even though (or because) he knew exactly what fate had in store for me. [Note: See What’s Next for Xu Zhangrun?] He excoriated the regime for its shameless persecution of me, more importantly he pinpointed the flawed logic behind their machinations while identifying the crux of our troubles in the context of our lived reality. His concern for the state of the law in China was consistently framed by an unflinching advocacy for the rule of law itself. For he knew that if true justice is impossible we are all reduced to a state of banditry. Fully aware of the punishment that would be meted out to me, Professor Cohen invited me to teach at the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, which he had founded at New York University. It was a heartfelt act of generosity offered to me at a time of pressing need, a helping hand extended to a likeminded colleague on the other side of the world who was submerged in iniquity. His generosity was a practical recognition of our shared humanity. This venerable Professor was not only a teacher of stature and an unwavering champion of substantive exchange between West and East, he was also an outstanding humanitarian whose real-world actions were a practical expression of his ideals. [Source]
In his Pekingnology newsletter, Zichen Wang translated another tribute to “The Evergreen Pine of the Rule of Law in China” by Peking University law professor Zhang Qianfan, originally published at FT Chinese:
Jerry’s vitality, I believe, owed much to his lighthearted wit and humor—something everyone who knew him experienced firsthand. But it also came from his candor. Whenever he spoke in China, his words were sharp, incisive, and unreserved—though his humor softened the edge of his critiques, particularly on issues such as criminal justice. Unlike Chinese scholars, he did not face the same constraints, though such concerns are of course understandable. His frankness reminded me of the late Professor Guo Daohui, one of China’s “Three Elders of the Rule of Law” (alongside Professors Jiang Ping and Li Buyun). Guo once said his secret to longevity was simple: always speak the truth. Longevity, it seems, knows no borders; honesty is its common thread.
Jerry’s warmth, generosity, and accessibility endeared him to every Chinese legal scholar and student who crossed his path. Many regarded him as a true “old friend of the Chinese people.” In fact, I have long thought that China’s “Three Elders of the Rule of Law” should really have been four—with Jerry included. In recent years, as the environment for law and rights in China has grown increasingly challenging, Jerry’s steadfast voice and unwavering support for those in need became all the more precious. Each time a human rights case arose in China, he responded without hesitation, standing with courage and conviction.
In the autumn of 2016, I brought a group of American constitutional enthusiasts to visit Jerry at NYU’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute. He graciously convened a special seminar for us—more a dialogue on the rule of law than a lecture. Everyone present was struck by his brilliance, his wit, and his gentlemanly grace. Later, as we shared a taxi ride, he recounted how, quite by accident, he had embarked on the path of studying Chinese law—a story well known to many. As we parted, I held his hand and said: for him, it may have been a “beautiful accident,” but for us, it was a “fortunate accident.” That such an extraordinary man should devote decades of his life to advocating tirelessly for the rule of law in China was indeed China’s great fortune. [Source]
Many others remembered Cohen on social media:
Jerry Cohen was kind and helpful when he didn’t need to be. It’s a miracle he finished his memoirs, because he was too busy continuing to live. If you’ve learned something in the US about law in China, you or your teachers have Jerry to thank. We’ll miss him.
www.wsj.com/world/china/…
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— Graham Webster (@gwbstr.com) September 23, 2025 at 9:13 AM
R.i.P. Jerome Cohen (July 1, 1930 – September 22, 2025)
Very saddened and shocked to hear of the passing of Jerry Cohen. He is the champion of promoting rule of law and human rights in China and other East Asian countries. His support is priceless for my career and my life.
— tengbiao (@tengbiao.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 10:37 AM
Prof. Cohen was a true “old friend of the Chinese people.” He was a pioneer in building bridges between China and America. He genuinely cared about human rights defenders, extended a helping hand whenever he can. RIP. One day you will be in official Chinese history books, Jerry! https://t.co/9Ypdcxdz8t
— Yaqiu Wang 王亚秋 (@Yaqiu) September 23, 2025
美国的中国及东亚法律专家、纽约大学法学院教授 Jerome Cohen（孔杰荣教授）于周一去世，享年95岁。生前他曾倾力帮助中国的良心人士。R.I.P ！https://t.co/5N5ZkSabuE
— Suyutong (@Suyutong) September 23, 2025
“Jerome Cohen, the American expert on Chinese and East Asian law and NYU School of Law professor, passed away on Monday, aged 95. He devoted his life to helping people of conscience in China. R.I.P.!”
His office door was always open to us reporters in HK and he never wasted our time. Enjoyed his appearances during Covid lockdown on the New University in Exile course in Chinese human rights.
— Dinah Lee Küng (@DinahLeeKung) September 23, 2025
关心中国人权的最著名法律教授孔杰荣Jerome Cohen昨天去世，享年95岁，愿他安息。作为最受尊敬的法学泰斗他长期关心支持中国的维权律师，公开批评中共，不断为被迫害的人发出声音，难能可贵。
他曾经推动中国律师的培训和西方法学界交流，后来无法继续。他也长期支持中国人权 @hrichina… pic.twitter.com/yxufWqQEFf
— 周锋锁 Fengsuo Zhou (@ZhouFengSuo) September 23, 2025
“Jerome Cohen, the most renowned legal scholar dedicated to human rights in China, passed away yesterday, aged 95. May he rest in peace. A highly esteemed legal luminary, he deserves praise for his longstanding concern and support for China’s rights defense lawyers, public criticism of the Party, and tireless advocacy for the persecuted. He promoted exchanges between Chinese lawyers and the Western legal community until this eventually became untenable. He was also a longstanding supporter of our work at Human Rights In China, and made a point of asking about it after I sent out an announcement about Li Guobei and Lu Siwei receiving this year’s China Human Rights Lawyer Award. Although well into his 90s, he was physically hearty and mentally sharp, still keeping abreast of all kinds of topics while also caring for his wife in her old age. It seemed as if he could keep going forever, so the news of his departure is especially shocking and saddening.”
I am deeply saddened to learn of the passing of Jerry Cohen. Jerry was not just a colleague at the Council on Foreign Relations—he was a towering figure in China studies and a true pioneer who helped shape our understanding of Chinese law and society for over six decades.…
— Yanzhong Huang (@YanzhongHuang) September 23, 2025
A giant in the field of China studies has passed from our midst, the great Jerry Cohen. I am one of countless scholars he mentored & enlightened, always w/ a mischievous twinkle in his eye & inspirational stories of personal involvement.
— John Delury (@JohnDelury) September 23, 2025
Jerry’s influence will be felt and memory will be cherished for a long, long time. He guided new giants in the field of China and the law, @greenlawchina @MargaretKLewis @yujiechentw to name 3, who will continue his legacy. Rest in peace.
— John Delury (@JohnDelury) September 23, 2025
I would not be here without Jerry Cohen’s support and encouragement.
He saw what he could learn from, and do for, others-from longtime friends to random students at his lectures- building on strengths rather than poking at weaknesses.
And this made his criticisms ring true. pic.twitter.com/MgvE9MWmMF
— China Law Translate/Jeremy Daum (@chinalawtransl8) September 23, 2025
Ha, we all seem to have stories about how nice Jerry was to us when we were young and inexperienced. I met Jerry for the first time at a party about 10 years ago. He talked to me as if he knew me, as if I was his equal.
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— Yaqiu Wang 王亚秋 (@yaqiu.bsky.social) September 23, 2025 at 7:32 PM
The U.S.-Asia Law Institute, which Cohen co-founded, highlighted some of his other notable students:
Professor Cohen – who preferred to be called “Jerry” in person – had a genius for mentoring and networking. He taught or mentored several generations of lawyers, judges, government officials, and legal scholars at Harvard Law School and New York University Law School, including many from East Asia. His former students include Ma Ying-jeou, president of Taiwan from 2008-2016; Annette Hsiu-Lien Lu, vice president of Taiwan from 2000-2008; Clark Randt Jr., US ambassador to China from 2000-2009; and Stephen Orlins, current president of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. Despite his increasingly elevated connections, Professor Cohen remained famously accessible to students and young lawyers, generously providing recommendations and introductions.
[…] What distinguished Professor Cohen from many other foreign experts on East Asia was his insistence on pursuing open-minded, respectful communication with authoritarians in China and elsewhere in the region, while also publicly critiquing their human rights abuses and other shortcomings in their legal systems. This approach discomforted both those who argue that authoritarians should be isolated and those who argue that criticisms should be made only in private in order to “save face.” In another example of his refusal to hew to black-and-white positions, he both advocated US normalization of relations with the People’s Republic of China in the 1970s, knowing that it would mean ending formal ties with the rival Republic of China on Taiwan, and was a staunch supporter of Taiwan’s struggle as a new democracy to remain a member of the international community.
In 2020, the government of Taiwan awarded him the Order of Brilliant Star with Grand Cordon for his contributions to promoting Taiwan-US legal exchanges. Then-Ambassador Lily L. W. Hsu, director general of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York, also thanked him for his contributions to the development of human rights and the rule of law in Taiwan. “It is fair to say that Jerry has not only witnessed the entire transformation of Taiwan into the full-fledged democracy it is today, but also played no small role in the process,” she said. [Source]
On X, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs described Cohen as a “steadfast friend of Taiwan’s democracy. We are grateful for his lifelong support for freedom & extend our deepest condolences to his loved ones.”
In a 2020 profile at The Wire China, Jason Fry and Chloe Fox described a major shift in Cohen’s career after a decade in corporate law in the early years of Reform and Opening:
The Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 soon crystallized Cohen’s true interests. “After June 4, I decided it was more important to deal with human rights than with commercial law,” he says. “Things had shifted in China.”
The criminal justice system had emerged as an instrument of suppression, and Cohen watched in horror as deans at Beijing’s budding law schools defended the shift by distinguishing between its use on “counterrevolutionaries” and “the people.” While he remained at [New York law firm] Paul Weiss until 2000, he joined NYU’s Law School in 1990 and co-founded the U.S.-Asia Law Institute hoping to advance political and civil law in the country.
“He could have hung it up years ago or decades ago and retired as a partner from Paul Weiss,” says Margaret Lewis, a former student who now teaches at Seton Hall. “He didn’t. He had this whole other chapter focusing on human rights and the rule of law. It really was in his third act that he moved to the forefront.”
[…] Cohen has also looked on as Beijing, under the rule of Xi Jinping, has mounted a ferocious crackdown on all forms of dissent, jailing prominent lawyers and even building mass detention centers to house the ethnic Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, in the country’s far northwest. In Hong Kong — once a model of free speech and press freedom — merely holding up a sign expressing disenchantment with Beijing could be grounds for arrest.
For a man who has devoted his life to patiently pushing the boulder of engagement with China up the hill, these rollbacks undoubtedly come with a bit of a Sisyphean sting.
“As the father of all this,” Orlins says, “I think he’s particularly hurt and disappointed at the treatment of lawyers, the lack of an independent judiciary, and Party interference in the judicial process. Things which we were hopeful for, and watched change.” [Source]
In February, Cohen published his memoir, “Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law.” In a chapter excerpted at China Books Review, he reflected on the question: “Was Helping China Build Its Post-1978 Legal System A Mistake?” and argued that “from the perspective of the late 1970s, it was imperative to help China mitigate the risks of further impoverishment and renewed political chaos.”
Should those of us who cooperated with China in its sudden hunger for Western law have refused on political grounds? 40 years later, fueled by hindsight, critics now gaining favor in Washington say that we should have realized that our efforts would strengthen an ever more repressive communist dictatorship that is said now to threaten liberal-democratic countries and international security as well as its own people. At the time, however, a government that had repudiated the Cultural Revolution’s killing of several million people and persecution of perhaps 100 million more was seeking our help in using law to prevent a recurrence of that national tragedy.
[…] On political grounds, I feel no guilt or regret about the years spent cooperating with China during the halcyon days of the largely optimistic 1980s prior to the massacre of June 4. Nor am I doubtful about the desirability of continuing that cooperation today, as the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University’s School of Law, and other foreign institutions, struggle to do. Helping to reduce the number of wrongful convictions in China, assisting in lessening the amount of time alleged offenders spend in notorious pretrial detention, striving to enhance protections for the country’s embattled human rights lawyers, and promoting the achievement of equal rights for women are useful services, even though success in these efforts may contribute to the stability of the communist regime by alleviating important grievances. As Chinese friends have privately emphasized, the Western effort has reinforced the Chinese people’s longing for “equal justice under law.” I believe in cooperation with the PRC where possible and sensible, while also endorsing competition in economics and even containment, as necessary, in political-military affairs.
[…] What is at stake, in our collective quest to answer these questions and to understand China, is more than the theoretical and practical benefits to be derived from the detached academic study of comparative law. I like to believe that my perhaps excessive passion for the subject of arbitrary detention involves not so much personal ego as recognition of the need I hope we all feel to extend to Chinese people the benefits of “equal justice under law.” Core among those benefits is protection against the cruelty and injustice of arbitrary detention, wherever it occurs. That is why I have emphasized my sympathy for all the victims of China’s increasingly sophisticated repression. [Source]
A key focus of this concern since 2015 were the victims of the 709 (July 9) Crackdown on China’s community of rights lawyers. Cohen marked the tenth anniversary of the crackdown this year with an essay co-authored by exiled legal scholar Teng Biao and published at The Wire China:
A decade later, the memory of 709 remains a grim milestone in the CCP’s war on the rule of law. But it also remains a testament to the courage and resistance of those who fight for justice and rule of law inside a dictatorial system.
[…] By the time Xi Jinping came to power, the CCP was already facing a multifaceted crisis. Its ideology had lost its appeal. The internet had greatly undermined the effectiveness of censorship and propaganda. Environmental degradation, unrest in border regions, and public dissatisfaction with the system had been building for decades. Most fundamentally and seriously, the economy had begun to slow down, worsening China’s socio-political problems.
In the face of these mounting crises, the Communist Party’s fear of a “color revolution” inevitably intensified. In the eyes of Xi Jinping and the Party leadership, the previous level of repression was no longer sufficient to stop civil society from posing a direct threat to the regime. The new model of suppression was not reactive, but planned and systematic; it did not target just those who crossed red lines but aimed at wiping out civil society as a whole, and destroying the capacity for collective resistance.
Xi Jinping abolished the two-term limit for the presidency, intensified censorship on the internet, media and in schools, shut down thousands of NGOs, persecuted religious groups, arrested entrepreneurs, journalists, artists, academics and anyone who disobeyed its dictates. By implementing the National Security Law in Hong Kong in 2020, the CCP brazenly and deliberately destroyed Hong Kong’s freedom. Since 2017, between one and three million Uyghurs, Kazaks and other Turkic people in Xinjiang (East Turkestan) have been detained in concentration camps. Tibet’s index of freedom is now lower than North Korea, as reported by the Freedom House. As part of this political purge, the 709 Crackdown sent a clear message: what the CCP wants is not rule of law, but rule by fear. [Source]
In a 2020 interview with Hong Kong Free Press, discussing the deteriorating situation across China, Cohen said: “Of course I feel terribly sad, I feel terribly angry. I feel I have to do everything I can to increase public understanding of what’s about to take place. I have an obligation because of my knowledge and experience of 60 years.” He also expressed optimism about longer-term possibilities, however. As he told NYU Law Magazine in 2009 that, “Seeing the changes I’ve seen in China over the last 40 years, I know that [genuine rule of law] is possible. And what better use for my life? I’ve engaged in meaningful work, and I am having an impact.” In a December 2024 interview with Evan Peng for The Wire China, Cohen commented:
There are crises in countries where some people win, some lose — we’re facing one here in the U.S. that will tell our direction. So I’ve always regarded the future as open with regard to China. Much depends on how we play our cards, and much depends, of course, on their internal development. But the future is often unpredictable, so I can’t say.
Remember, I’m old. I’m older than the generation of my students and colleagues who are in their 70s now, but they took June 4 [1989 — the Tiananmen massacre] harder than I did. They had only known the period of the late 1970s and 1980s, by and large a very optimistic period. I had lived through the Cultural Revolution, so I knew China could go from one way to another, as it did in 1966, and so I wasn’t so surprised at the recent years’ developments. And I still think the future is open.
I’m not totally pessimistic, as some people are. China’s development has been pendulum-like: one extreme to the other, back and forth. It depends where on the pendulum that you locate things. At the moment, we’re in a repressive period. That won’t last. It can’t last. [Source]
