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Law Reform in Vietnam: The Complex Transition from Socialism and Soviet Models in Legal Scholarship and Training

Year: 1993

Type: article

Abstract: Vietnam's economic reform effort and intends to retain firm political control, the legal system is being required to serve simultaneously as a means of market liberalization and as a continuing tool to maintain the political authority of the Party and the state apparatus it has created and reinforced.The Vietnamese legal system cannot begin to fulfil the complex, challenging, and contradictory tasks set for it-and, perhaps more importantly, no meaningful debate on those challenges and contradictory goals can begin in Vietnam without a highly trained and sophisticated group of legal professionals and legal scholars.Legal training and research constitutes the base from which an effort to confront the challenges of economic liberalization and political stability and their contradictions must initially emanate, for without practitioners and scholars who can both understand and question the goals set for the legal system there can be little hope for significant progress in the legal sector.It was to understand this key base for legal reform in Vietnam that the Ford Foundation requested a consultancy report in early 1992.The goal of the consultancy-with results described in this article-was to understand the current position and role of legal training and research facilities in Vietnam, to determine the status, training, and interests of faculty, and to study the prospects for reform and expansion of this sector as a precondition and contribution to broader reform of the legal system.That consultancy visit, and this report, constitute the first systematic study of the role of Vietnam's legal training and research sector in the Vietnamese legal reform process. 2

Source: UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal

DOI: 10.5070/p8112022040

Author: Mark Sidel