Jerome A. Cohen, professor emeritus of law at New York University and founding director of the law school’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute, who passed away on September 22, 2025, introduced the study of China’s legal system into American law schools. Through his writings, teaching, private diplomacy, and public advocacy, he was an influential advocate for human rights and the rule of law in China and across East Asia as the region emerged from colonialism and post-war authoritarian rule to become an economic powerhouse. In public, he frequently spoke in support of human rights lawyers and political detainees, while in private he advised their families on political and legal strategies for obtaining their release.
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.
He was fond of repurposing Chinese aphorisms, such as “walk on two legs” (两条脚走路), Mao Zedong’s slogan advocating a balanced approach to China’s development. The saying was an apt metaphor for his own career, which for several decades combined scholarship with professional practice. One direct benefit was that his research and writing stayed anchored in reality. Never satisfied with being merely a scholarly observer, he relished opportunities to use his academic prominence to advocate on behalf of imprisoned lawyers and pro-democracy reformers.
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.
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 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.
And in 2018, the government of Japan bestowed on Professor Cohen the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, one of the highest honors it confers upon foreign nationals, for his contributions in promoting interactions among Japanese and US legal professionals as well as to enhancing the understanding of Japan among people in the United States.
Other honors include the American Foreign Law Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in International Law, bestowed in 2021.
Professor Cohen began studying and teaching about China’s legal system in the early 1960s. Beginning in 1964, he introduced the teaching of Asian law into the curriculum of Harvard Law School, where he was the Jeremiah Smith professor of law, associate dean, and eventually director of East Asian Legal Studies, a program that he created. He published his path-breaking book, The Criminal Process in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1963: An Introduction, in 1968, more than a decade before the United States and China normalized diplomatic relations. He conducted research for the book during a year in Hong Kong, where he interviewed recent arrivals from China and scoured newspapers and documents from China.
Although earlier Western scholars had translated and studied some of imperial China’s legal codes and written about efforts by the post-imperial Republic of China government to create a constitutional form of government, very little had been written about law in the People’s Republic of China when Professor Cohen began to study it. Few Westerners had access to the country during the 1950s and 1960s, and little information was available about what role, if any, law played in the early PRC. Professor Cohen’s book about the PRC criminal process showed that it was possible to glean quite a bit about crime and punishment in the PRC by interviewing Chinese refugees in Hong Kong and reading Chinese newspapers.
First Western lawyer in Beijing after 1949
Professor Cohen lived in Beijing from 1979 to 1981 and took part in trade and investment contract negotiations as a consultant to Coudert Brothers LLP, a New York-based law firm. A 2009 profile in the NYU Law Magazine described how Professor Cohen became, by its account, “the first Western lawyer to practice in Beijing under communist rule.” The report said that Professor Cohen was in Hong Kong on a sabbatical from Harvard, consulting on the side for Coudert, when the Chinese government announced a set of economic and legal reforms to open China to foreign trade and investment. The magazine said that “Cohen’s phone began ringing off the hook from Fortune 500 companies interested in setting up joint ventures in China. … A former Chinese tutor of his at Harvard, for instance, put him in touch with Xiao Yang, who headed the Beijing Economic Commission. Xiao and Cohen worked out a deal: In exchange for teaching 30 of Xiao’s commerce officials basic contract and business law a few hours a week, Cohen would receive permission to live and practice in Beijing, something no Western lawyer had done since the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949.”
Cohen received permission to live and practice in Beijing, “something no Western lawyer had done since the People’s Republic of China was established in 1949.”
In 1981, Professor Cohen joined the New York-based firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, LLP, where he advised Western companies seeking to invest in the fast-growing Chinese economy. He continued to lecture at Harvard Law School. A decade later, while continuing a relationship with Paul, Weiss, he joined the faculty of NYU, where he taught courses such as Law and Society in China, China’s Attitude Toward International Law, and Legal Problems of Doing Business with China and East Asia.
Founding the U.S.-Asia Law Institute
He and Professor Frank K. Upham founded the U.S.-Asia Law Institute (USALI) at the NYU School of Law in 2006 to promote the rule of law and human rights in East Asia and serve as a bridge between the legal communities in East Asia and the United States. USALI provides an essential public service by educating important constituencies about developments in Asian legal systems and societies, bolstering legal reform efforts with comparative research and international expertise, and nurturing the current and next generation of scholars and practitioners who will set the direction of future legal reform.
In one of his most public interventions on behalf of a Chinese dissident, Professor Cohen advised Chinese rights activist and “barefoot lawyer” Chen Guangcheng after he escaped from extra-legal house arrest in 2012 and sought refuge at the US Embassy in Beijing. Ultimately, Professor Cohen helped broker an agreement allowing Chen to come to the United States and study law at NYU. NYU Law hosted Chen and his family during their first year in the country.
At various points over the years, Professor Cohen was advisor to the government of China’s Sichuan Province, chairman of the American Arbitration Association's China Conciliation Committee, a member of the panel of arbitrators of both the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Commission and the China Securities Regulatory Commission in Beijing, a trustee of the China Institute in America, a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. He was chairman of the New York/Beijing Friendship (Sister City) Committee, a trustee of The Asia Society, a corporate director of the Japan Society, and vice chairman of the Advisory Council for the Johns Hopkins-Nanjing University Joint Center in China. He also was active for many years at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was C.V. Starr senior fellow, director of Asia studies, and eventually an adjunct senior fellow.
Retirement
He retired from Paul, Weiss in 2000 after more than 20 years of law practice focused on East Asia, especially China. In 2020, he retired from NYU School of Law at the age of 90 after more than 30 years of teaching. In retirement, Professor Cohen continued to host a steady stream of visitors at his New York City apartment for trenchant conversation about the news of the day from East Asia. From time to time, he moderated online speaker programs for USALI or the Council on Foreign Relations, usually wearing one of his signature bow ties.
In retirement, Professor Cohen hosted a steady stream of visitors at his New York City apartment for trenchant conversation about the news of the day from East Asia.
Professor Cohen published hundreds of scholarly articles on various topics. In addition to his early book on China’s criminal law, he authored People’s China and International Law (1974, with H.D. Chiu) and Challenge to China: How Taiwan Abolished its Version of Re-education Through Labor (2013, with Margaret Lewis). His memoir, Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law was published in early 2025 by Columbia University Press. He also co-wrote China Today with his wife, Joan Lebold Cohen. He published countless journalistic opinion pieces for various newspapers, and posted short commentaries about news developments on his personal blog.
Professor Cohen was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Yale College (B.A. 1951). He spent the 1951-1952 academic year as a Fulbright scholar in France and graduated from Yale Law School in 1955 after serving as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for both Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren (1955) and Justice Felix Frankfurter (1956). He subsequently practiced law with Covington & Burling LLP, served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, and was a consultant to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations before beginning his academic career at the University of California School of Law at Berkeley in 1959. It was during his time at Berkeley that he accepted a Rockefeller Foundation grant to study China.