In Depth: The Faculty of Law (Hong Kong's Oldest Law School)

Module: 01 Academics · In-depth Dossier Last updated: 10 July 2026 This dossier takes a close look at the history, structure, research landscape, programmes and practical training of HKU's Faculty of Law — the oldest law school in Hong Kong. For a faculty-level overview, see faculties.md; for a five-decade chronological history, see law-faculty-history.md.

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# 1. History: from a department in the Faculty of Social Sciences to an independent faculty

Law teaching at HKU has a long pedigree, but it was a marginal pursuit until the Department of Law was formally established in 1969. According to Wikipedia^※, the University had been offering law-related courses since the 1920s–1930s, but law was then merely a component of the Bachelor of Arts degree rather than a discipline in its own right — it took nearly four decades before law gained independent departmental status at HKU. This "prehistory" matters: the 1969 founding was not a creation from nothing, but the institutional consolidation of decades of scattered law teaching.

One transitional step often skipped over is the extra-mural provision that immediately preceded the department. According to the Faculty of Law's own history pages^※, between 1964 and 1969 HKU ran, through its Extra-mural Studies department, part-time external LLB courses of the University of London — the degree was awarded by London; HKU's role was confined to teaching. This arrangement answered a local demand for formal legal training, but it also exposed a structural deficiency: qualifications still had to be sought from abroad. That gap was the direct prelude to establishing a local degree-awarding law department in 1969.

Why it had to be done. Before a local law school existed, studying law effectively meant going overseas — a profession with a high overseas dependence and a forbiddingly high threshold, open only to those who could afford training in Britain. According to a review of the faculty's history monograph published by HKU Press^※, officialdom was not oblivious to this: the review quotes a serving Registrar General of the day lamenting that the door to a great profession was shut to those without deep pockets, "very nearly a matter for regret". The establishment of the HKU law department was precisely about converting legal education from an elite privilege of studying abroad into a professional path available locally.

Humble beginnings. The scale the faculty later achieved throws its modest start into relief. According to the same review^※, the 1969 department occupied premises on Caine Road (坚道) with 3 teachers and 40 students; half a century on, it is a world-class faculty of about 80 full-time academic staff and students numbering in the thousands, housed in its own building (see Section 5). From a few rooms on Caine Road to an eleven-storey tower on the Centennial Campus, that upward trajectory is itself a microcosm of the "localisation" of Hong Kong's legal education.

Per the Faculty of Law's history pages^※ and the Faculty of Law's Wikipedia entry^※:

• First Head of Department: according to Wikipedia, Professor Dafydd Evans (seconded from the London School of Economics, LSE) was the founding head, serving as Head and later Dean until 1987; he was awarded an OBE in 1989 in recognition of his contribution to legal education.
• According to Wikipedia, the department's founding predicament — "few students dared to enrol" when classes first opened — was later recorded in the 50th-anniversary history published by HKU Press (written by Christopher Munn, covering 1969–2019).

# The origin of Hong Kong's legal qualification pathway

• Both the LLB (three-year Bachelor of Laws) and the PCLL (from 1972) were, according to the faculty's history pages, the first local university qualifications recognised for direct entry into legal practice; Wikipedia describes the PCLL as "Hong Kong's first complete local pathway to professional training".
• HKU also produced Hong Kong's first Doctor of Philosophy in Law — according to the Faculty of Law^※, Peter Wesley-Smith was HKU's first PhD in Law.

A reform of the PCLL. The PCLL has not stood still. According to the faculty's history pages^※, Hong Kong conducted a Review of Legal Education and Training between 1999 and 2001, whose conclusions drove a reform of the PCLL, shifting the curriculum's centre of gravity toward practical skills training (drafting, advocacy, transactional work) rather than pure knowledge transmission. This review — known in the profession as the Redmond-Roper Review — cemented the PCLL's subsequent identity as a pre-practice skills bridge: the LLB/JD supplies the knowledge base of the law, while the PCLL turns students into "practice-ready" prospective professionals.

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# 2. Structure today

According to the Faculty of Law's history pages^※, the Faculty has traditionally been organised into two departments:

This two-part split maps directly onto the two stages of Hong Kong legal training: the Department of Law handles the academic, knowledge-based programmes — the LLB, JD and LLM — while the Department of Professional Legal Education is responsible for the PCLL, the pre-practice skills training. One side is "knowledge", the other "skills", and together they mark a clean separation between "studying law" and "entering the profession", each answering to its own accreditation and qualification standards.

According to Wikipedia, from 2024 the two departments were merged into a unitary structure — the old institutional divide between "knowledge teaching (Department of Law)" and "professional training (Department of Professional Legal Education)" was dissolved, with a single unified framework now overseeing the whole chain from undergraduate to vocational education. For the precise internal arrangements, refer to the official pages.

Deans through the years. According to the faculty's history pages^※ and the Wikipedia entry, the succession of Department Heads and Deans since 1969 is well documented; the founding head, Professor Dafydd Evans, served the longest term (1969–1987) and laid the faculty's institutional foundations. The current Dean is Professor Fu Hualing (傅华伶), holder of the Chan Chun Lan Chair in Human Rights and Responsibility; per public announcements of his reappointment, he began a second term in November 2025.

Governance controversies touching individual former deans (such as the 2015 controversy over the selection of a Pro-Vice-Chancellor) fall, under our biographical and governance conventions, in the "unofficial history" zone and are not taken up here; see ../13-governance-and-reform/pro-vice-chancellor-2015.md.

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# 3. The research landscape: a division of labour across seven centres

The Faculty's research is not spread across a flat plane but is carried by seven research centres/institutes, each with its own field. According to the Faculty of Law's research pages^※ and the Wikipedia entry^※, the centres' founding years and areas of focus are as follows:

Reading the founding years tells a clear story of expansion: the 1990s laid the two foundation stones of public law (CCPL) and financial law (AIIFL), answering Hong Kong's twin demands as an international financial centre and a "one country, two systems" constitutional experiment; the 2000s added technology law and Chinese law; the 2010s extended into medical ethics; and the 2020s have added interdisciplinary and private law. The research map has consistently tracked Hong Kong's actual position as a common law jurisdiction, an international commercial hub, and an interface between two legal systems.

Division of labour among the flagship centres. According to the Faculty of Law's research pages^※, CCPL's projects fall broadly within comparative human rights, empirical legal research, equality and anti-discrimination, the application of international law within the local legal order, judicial studies and public law governance, and it publishes the Scopus-indexed Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law; AIIFL, for its part, is the Faculty's hub for corporate and financial law research, and has long brought prominent overseas scholars to Hong Kong through public lectures and conferences. AIIFL's financial law research overlaps considerably with the business school and the economics-and-finance fields — see deepdive-business-economics.md; the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law's common law–civil law comparison connects up with mainland students and cross-border legal issues (see ../16-mainland-students/welcome.md).

Academic weight. The Faculty has gathered a body of scholars influential in both the Chinese-speaking and international legal academies. According to the Faculty's staff pages^※, constitutional law scholar Professor Albert Chen (陈弘毅), holder of the Chan Lan Chiu Chair in Constitutional Law, has published more than 200 articles or chapters in Chinese- and English-language journals and monographs, with a long-standing research focus on Hong Kong's legal system, the Basic Law and the rule of law.

International visibility is especially pronounced in financial law. According to AIIFL's team pages^※, Professor Douglas Arner, holder of the Kerry Holdings Professor in Law, is a co-founder and former director of AIIFL, with research spanning financial regulation, financial technology (FinTech) and regulatory technology (RegTech); his personal output runs to 18 books and over 200 articles and reports, and by total SSRN downloads he ranks in the global top 50 among all authors and the top 15 among law authors. The online Introduction to FinTech course he led was launched on edX in 2018 and has accumulated more than 100,000 learners across nearly every country. Research of this kind ties the Faculty of Law directly to Hong Kong's real-world needs as an international financial centre (for finance, compare deepdive-business-economics.md). The Faculty's research strength is one of the foundations of its long-standing high position in the QS subject rankings (see Section 9).

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# 4. Programme landscape

According to Wikipedia, the JD is an intensive programme for those without a prior law degree; the PCLL is one of the required stages of training for solicitors and barristers in Hong Kong. The three professional routes fit together: the LLB or JD provides the law degree, the PCLL completes the pre-practice skills training, and only then may one enter practice (for course selection and joint degrees, see programs.md).

The LLM's specialist streams. The LLM is far from monolithic; it is divided into several specialist streams so that lawyers from different backgrounds can take what they need. According to the Faculty's LLM pages^※, the standing streams are:

Among these, the Master of Common Law (MCL) has particular institutional significance. According to the faculty's history pages^※, since 1997 the programme has provided common law training to more than 350 mainland judges and government officials — a distinctive role for HKU Law in bridging the two legal systems.

Cross-border dual degrees. The Faculty runs dual-degree programmes with a number of leading overseas law schools, letting students earn qualifications in two jurisdictions. According to the history pages^※, partner institutions include the University of British Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, University College London (UCL), the University of Zurich, Peking University and the University of California, Berkeley; research collaborations extend to the University of Cambridge, the University of New South Wales and the National University of Singapore. This network embeds the HKU law degree in the global teaching and research map of the common law and comparative law.

The division of labour between LLB and JD. The two local gateways to a law degree serve different populations. According to the Faculty's undergraduate pages^※, the LLB is a four-year undergraduate degree (converted from three years in the 2004–05 academic year) and has long been one of HKU's programmes with the highest admission scores and the fiercest competition; it can be taken as a standalone degree or combined with politics, business and the like in a double degree (BSocSc (Politics and Law) & LLB, BBA(Law) & LLB), giving students a second disciplinary foundation alongside law. According to a study-abroad overview^※, the JD is a two-year postgraduate degree designed for those without a prior law background — someone who read engineering, finance or translation as an undergraduate can switch into law via the JD. The two routes converge: both must eventually clear the PCLL (see Section 7). This "dual-entry LLB/JD" design is uncommon in the common law world and is a structural feature of Hong Kong legal education.

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# 5. Home in the Cheng Yu Tung Tower: physical space and practical training

The Faculty of Law long "lodged" in various buildings across campus before acquiring an address of its own. According to the Faculty's building pages^※, the Cheng Yu Tung Tower (钟宇东楼) was completed in 2012 together with the Centennial Campus, and is the Faculty's first independent, purpose-built building since its 1969 start on Caine Road and its various temporary homes around campus — an eleven-storey tower housing faculty offices, the law library, classrooms and lecture theatres, and giving Hong Kong's oldest law school, for the first time, a complete "home" of its own. The building is named after the late businessman Cheng Yu-tung, and its completion was regarded by the Faculty as a new chapter in its history.

The building's design directly serves the practical side of legal training. Also per the building pages^※, it contains a Mooting Chamber, Advocacy Laboratories, academic conference rooms, research centres and postgraduate study spaces, and a Clinical Legal Education Centre — compressing classroom, research and hands-on practice into a single building.

From the classroom to the client. Practical training at HKU Law goes beyond simulation. According to the Faculty's clinical legal education pages^※, the Faculty runs a Free Legal Advice Scheme on campus, operating under the aegis of the Duty Lawyer Service, offering preliminary legal advice to members of the University and the public. Students on the clinical legal education programme encounter real cases through this scheme, honing professional skills and developing a pro bono culture — narrowing the distance between "law on paper" and "law for actual clients" to the span of one building, one advice room. The scheme serves both University members and the public, giving the Faculty's practical training a layer of public service to society as well.

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# 6. Size and influence

Per the Faculty of Law's Wikipedia entry^※:

On influence in the judiciary and the legal profession, the Wikipedia entry states that HKU Law has produced a substantial share of Hong Kong's senior counsel, along with several holders of the highest legal offices and judicial posts. According to the Wikipedia entry^※, the Faculty's alumni body includes the current Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal, three Permanent Judges of the Court of Final Appeal, three Secretaries for Justice, and roughly a third of the senior counsel cohort, while more than twenty past members of the Executive Council and Legislative Council were educated at HKU Law; the entry further states that over half of the judges across Hong Kong's higher courts are graduates of the Faculty.

Concrete proportions within the judiciary. The Wikipedia entry also gives verifiable tier-by-tier figures. Per the entry's statistics as of September 2024^※, HKU Law graduates hold the following shares of judicial posts at each level:

The higher the court, the greater the HKU share — this set of figures turns the general claim that "more than half of judges are HKU Law graduates" into countable seats. According to Mr Justice Ribeiro, Permanent Judge of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, in his speech at the Faculty of Law's 55th-anniversary celebration in 2024^※, since the department's founding in 1969 the Faculty has grown into an institution of pillar importance within Hong Kong's legal professional training system.

A contribution written into the faculty's history. HKU marked the 50th anniversary of the department's founding in 2019. According to the HKU Press history monograph review^※, Dr Christopher Munn's A Special Standing in the World: The Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong, 1969–2019, written from archives, publications and oral-history interviews, alternates between the Faculty's own story and its part in shaping Hong Kong's modern legal system. The review sets out several of the Faculty's institutional contributions that are often overlooked: its role in pushing for the drafting and advocacy of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance; and its part, before 1997, in the project of translating some 600 principal ordinances and more than 1,000 subsidiary regulations into Chinese — providing the scholarly and manpower support for a "bilingual legal system". On this basis, the review concludes that the history of HKU Law is, "to a very large extent, the history of modern Hong Kong law."

Individual entries on current judicial or government office-holders fall, under our biographical and governance conventions, within the relevant modules; this dossier confines itself to aggregate, faculty-level factual statements and does not name current office-holders.

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# 7. Three-way landscape: Hong Kong legal education and the PCLL bottleneck

HKU Law's "first" status only becomes clear within the overall landscape of Hong Kong legal education. Today, three institutions offer law degrees in Hong Kong: according to a Wikipedia compilation^※, besides HKU, founded in 1969, the City University of Hong Kong School of Law and the CUHK Faculty of Law (established in 2004, formally inaugurated in 2006) joined later; HKU is the oldest of the three. According to the Faculty's undergraduate pages^※, HKU also extended its LLB from three to four years in the 2004–05 academic year, in response to the changing skills expected of law graduates.

The dual LLB/JD entry. Unlike most common law jurisdictions, Hong Kong retains two entry routes into the legal profession: the undergraduate LLB and the postgraduate JD. According to a study-abroad compilation^※, students may enter the practice track either through the undergraduate LLB or the postgraduate JD — and both routes converge on the same narrow gate: the PCLL.

The PCLL bottleneck. The real bottleneck in Hong Kong's legal profession is not obtaining a law degree — it is getting into the PCLL. According to public data compiled by a study-abroad resource^※, in the 2023–24 academic year there were roughly 680 full-time PCLL places across Hong Kong, of which HKU offered about 300 and CUHK and CityU about 190 each; against that, the three law schools together award some 1,100 law degrees a year (about 390 LLB and 230 JD), and with LLM graduates and applicants with overseas qualifications also competing, the competition ratio is roughly 2–3:1. The same source states that each year about 38% of applicants who meet the academic threshold still fail to secure a PCLL place — this narrow gate is a shared rite of passage for every Hong Kong lawyer. Overseas law graduates must additionally complete a conversion course (covering core Hong Kong law subjects) before they may apply.

Before this narrow gate, HKU's JD record is relatively steady. Per the same source, citing HKU's 2023 graduate outcomes survey^※, more than 85% of that cohort's JD graduates secured PCLL places in the same year, and the proportion has stayed above 82% for five consecutive years; the source attributes this to the academic reputation of the HKU JD and the Faculty's long-standing internship relationships with major local law firms (for admissions and course selection, see programs.md).

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# 8. At the bar: the record in international mooting

The element of legal training closest to "real combat" is mooting — in a simulated court, students write written submissions and make oral arguments on difficult legal questions, and are graded by senior members of the profession. According to the Faculty's mooting pages^※, the Faculty selects student teams each year to compete in international competitions, the most prestigious of which is the Philip C. Jessup International Law Moot Court Competition — widely regarded as one of the largest and most famous mooting competitions in the world.

HKU teams have performed steadily in recent years. According to the Faculty's research blog^※, at the 2026 Jessup competition the HKU team first won the regional championship outright, then, in the international rounds held in Washington, ranked 9th in the world out of more than 700 teams on the combined written-submissions score, and took the M. Cherif Bassiouni Award for the best memorial — HKU's first such award since 2006. Separately, per the 2021 competition record^※, the HKU team won that year's regional championship, took the best memorial award for the respondent, and were the only Hong Kong team to advance to the international elimination rounds, ranking 25th out of more than 550 teams.

Beyond Jessup, HKU teams have also placed in specialised mooting competitions. According to a Hong Kong Lawyer round-up^※, an HKU team placed 4th out of 26 in the International Red Cross International Humanitarian Law Moot, and an intellectual property mooting team made the top 8 after the preliminary rounds. Results like these are another footnote to the Faculty's training line that pushes "law from the books" toward "law in the courtroom" (see the clinical legal education in Section 5) — mooting and the free legal advice scheme, one at each end, together complete a practical loop that runs from "simulation" to "real clients".

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# 9. International rankings: movement in the QS subject table

HKU Law has long ranked among the world's leading law schools in the QS World University Rankings by Subject (Law and Legal Studies). According to the Wikipedia entry^※, as early as 2019 the Faculty was ranked 18th in the world in the QS law subject ranking and 22nd in the Times Higher Education (THE) law ranking — one of Asia's top law schools that year. According to the Faculty's official newsletter^※, the Faculty ranked 15th in the world in the 2025 QS subject rankings; according to an HKU press release^※, in the subsequently released 2026 QS subject rankings the law subject was adjusted to 20th in the world. This kind of year-on-year movement (15th → 20th) is not unusual under QS subject ranking methodology — annual fluctuations in subject rankings are often driven by tweaks to indicator weights, changes in the peer-review sample and similar factors, and do not necessarily reflect any real rise or fall in a faculty's substantive teaching and research. This dossier reports the figures faithfully across several official vintages; for the broader debate over ranking methodology, see ranking-methodology-and-critiques.md.

Whatever the year-to-year movement, HKU Law has for many years held a stable place within the global top 20–25 in law — one of the Faculty's most stable rankings and among the most frequently cited in HKU's official publicity materials. Within Asia, it has likewise long stood in the front rank of regional law schools.

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# 10. Frequently asked questions

Is the HKU Faculty of Law the oldest law school in Hong Kong? Yes. According to the Faculty's history pages^※ and the Wikipedia entry^※, it was founded in 1969, predating City University and the CUHK Faculty of Law (established 2004); it is the oldest of Hong Kong's three law schools.

If I study law at HKU, can I become a lawyer? Not automatically. According to a study-abroad compilation^※, the LLB or JD is only a law degree; after that you must still be admitted to and complete the Postgraduate Certificate in Laws (PCLL) before you are qualified to practise. PCLL places across Hong Kong are limited, competition is about 2–3:1, and roughly a third of eligible applicants each year miss out on a place. HKU JD graduates' rate of securing PCLL places has stayed above 82% for the past five years.

What is the difference between the LLB and the JD? Per HKU's undergraduate pages^※ and the study-abroad resource^※, the LLB is a four-year undergraduate degree (which can be taken as a double degree) for secondary-school leavers; the JD is a two-year postgraduate degree, designed for those switching into law from a non-law undergraduate background. Both lead to the PCLL.

From admission to practice, roughly how many years? Taking the undergraduate route as a rough calculation: per HKU's undergraduate pages^※, after the four-year LLB you must complete the one-year PCLL to be qualified, and then still serve a traineeship or pupillage at a law firm or barristers' chambers. The postgraduate route is a two-year JD plus a one-year PCLL. In other words, "holding a law degree" is not the same as "being able to practise"; the PCLL and the traineeship are the unavoidable second half of the journey.

What is HKU Law's international ranking? According to the HKU press release^※, it was ranked 20th in the world in the 2026 QS World University Rankings by Subject (Law and Legal Studies); in recent years it has tended to move within the global top 15–25 (see Section 9). It is one of Hong Kong's highest-ranked law schools and has long stood in the front rank of Asian law schools.

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# 11. Not found / to be completed

• Precise current student/staff numbers: figures differ by vintage (the official pages give an overview figure of about 2,500 students, while Wikipedia records about 1,810 as of 2023); this dossier presents both with their vintages, and the latest figures should be taken from the Faculty's annual report.
• Details of the 2024 "unitary structure" integration: the internal arrangements of the two-department merger are to be taken from the official pages — marked "refer to the official pages".
• Year-by-year QS/THE precise rankings: no complete official compilation for 2020–2024 has been found; this dossier lists only the years supported by official or authoritative entries (2019, 2025, 2026).
• Latest size and output of the individual research centres: founding years are per Wikipedia; each centre's staffing and project numbers should be taken from its own website.
• Entries touching governance/rule-of-law controversies: per our conventions these fall within modules 13–18 and are not taken up here.

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