I was out for tea with a professor of law. I asked her why she chose to become a law professor and not a lawyer. She told me that she had originally wanted to become a lawyer, but upon graduation quickly came to see that being a lawyer in China was not about who you knew the law, but about who you knew in the legal community.

She had moved from a large city in inland China to southern China because her husband, a pHD, had gotten a professorial position in a university in southern China. She could have chosen to become a lawyer. I asked why not. She said no matter how “good” she would have been at her job, she would never have been able to make any money because she didn’t have any friends or family in southern China.

People in China do not hire lawyers for their legal ability, they hire them based on how good their relationships are to the judges, and therefore, how many favours from judges and other lawyers will they be able to get. Therefore, people will establish practices in the cities in which they studied, or the city in which they grew up and went to school. They remain localized because that is where many of their classmates will have graduated and become civil servants and judges and other lawyers, and where their family will have relatives or friends they can be introduced to.

In fact, one of the more “integral” parts of the legal process in China involves the lawyer taking the judge out for dinner and discussing how the case should be handled.

In China, because they use the civil code, you can become a judge at age 30. Being a judge is not about “making” the law like in common law, it is about interpreting the law as it is espoused by the government.

A law school graduate generally has two paths to follow: he or she can choose to become a lawyer or a judge. The distinction between these two professions is akin to choosing between becoming a government bureaucrat or a businessman. There is a lot more money to be made from being a lawyer, but it is far riskier. There is a lot more security in becoming a judge, but one is on a fixed salary. However, the bribe money that one would receive from plaintiffs and defendants would probably be much higher than that salary.

As a result, my friend chose to stay away from what she called “the dirtiness of the legal business” and stuck to theory by becoming a professor.