Five Decades of HKU Law — Hong Kong's First Law Faculty (1969–present)

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Integrated Information Database · Module 01 – Academic This article traces the five-decade evolution of the HKU Faculty of Law from "a single department" to "a full faculty." For subject strengths, the seven research centres and international rankings in depth, see deepdive-law.md; for programme selection, see programs.md; for a faculty/department overview, see faculties.md and departments.md. Disputes over university governance involving a former dean of the Faculty of Law (positions presented side by side, no adjudication) belong in the wild-history section: see ../13-governance-and-reform/pro-vice-chancellor-2015.md. As a factual-reference archive (modules 00–12), this repository records real names without credibility badges.

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# I. Origins: Why Hong Kong needed a local law faculty

Before 1969, Hong Kong had no local law school — those who aspired to legal careers had to study abroad, chiefly in the United Kingdom, leaving legal education and professional qualification heavily dependent on overseas institutions. The founding of the HKU Department of Law was precisely an attempt to change that picture.

According to Wikipedia's account^※, the department was set up with three goals in mind:

1. To increase the supply of local solicitors and barristers — easing the shortage of legal talent;
2. To train lawyers in Hong Kong law, not English law alone — grounding legal education in local practice;
3. To make proper legal education "available locally" — students could be trained without going abroad.

The transitional arrangement before the department: a borrowed degree. The 1969 department did not start "from zero." According to the Faculty's own history^※, from 1964 to 1969 the University had already run a part-time external LLB of the University of London through its Extra-mural Studies programme — the credential was awarded by London; HKU only delivered the teaching, and students had to register with the University of London as "external students." This stop-gap answered an urgent local demand for formal legal training, but it also exposed a structural weakness: the qualification still had to come from abroad. Even when the classes were held in Hong Kong and taught by Hong Kong teachers, the name on the diploma belonged to someone else. That is precisely what the 1969 establishment of a local degree-awarding law department — so that "legal education in Hong Kong grants a Hong Kong degree" — was set to fix.

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# II. Three elevations: Department → School → Faculty

According to the official history page^※ and the Wikipedia entry^※:

According to the official page^※, the HKU Law LLB and PCLL were Hong Kong's first recognised local university qualifications that could be used to apply for admission to practice — completing the loop from "educated locally" to "practising locally."

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# III. The widening programme ladder

The course offering, which began as LLB / PCLL, has grown into a complete legal-education system:

• According to the official page^※, the Master of Laws (LLM) has been offered since 1989;
• According to the official page^※, the Juris Doctor (JD), a doctor-level professional degree, was introduced in 2009;
• According to the official page^※, since 1997 the Master of Common Law has provided common-law training to more than 350 judges and government officials from mainland China — a distinctive role that places HKU Law at the junction of the two legal systems (for mainland students and cross-border issues, see ../16-mainland-students/welcome.md).

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# IV. From Caine Road to the Cheng Yu Tung Tower: a faculty's search for a home

The five-decade story of HKU Law is not just about programmes and institutional upgrading; it is also a history of "house-hunting." According to a review of the faculty's history monograph^※, the department began life in 1969 in premises on Caine Road (堅道) — modest in scale, with barely any space to call its own. Over the following decades the faculty was shuffled between buildings across campus with no permanent address of its own.

That changed only in 2012. According to the Faculty's building page^※, with the completion of the Centennial Campus the Faculty moved into the Cheng Yu Tung Tower (鍾宇東樓) — the first purpose-built building of its own since the Faculty's founding in 1969, named after the late businessman Cheng Yu-tung. The eleven-storey tower houses faculty offices, the law library, classrooms and lecture theatres, and includes a mooting chamber, advocacy laboratories and a Clinical Legal Education Centre — gathering classroom teaching, academic research and practical training under one roof for the first time. The building also hosts a free legal advice scheme run under the aegis of the Duty Lawyer Service, offering initial legal advice to university members and the public and letting students sharpen their professional skills on real cases (the full map of practical training and research centres appears in sections III and V of deepdive-law.md).

Two reorganisations of governance. According to the official history page^※, the Faculty was traditionally split into a Department of Law, responsible for academic education (LLB/JD/LLM), and a Department of Professional Legal Education, dedicated to the PCLL pre-practice qualification; according to the Wikipedia entry^※, this two-department arrangement was consolidated from 2024 into a unitary structure — the old institutional line between "knowledge teaching" and "professional training" was dissolved in favour of a single framework running the whole pipeline from undergraduate to vocational education.

Deans through the decades. The founding head, Professor Dafydd Evans, was seconded from the London School of Economics (LSE) and served as head of department and then dean until 1987 — an eighteen-year tenure that laid the faculty's institutional foundations; he was awarded an OBE in 1989. According to the Faculty's staff pages and public announcements^※, the current dean is Professor Fu Hualing (傅华伶), Chan Professor in Human Rights and Responsibilities, who began a second term in November 2025. From Evans to Fu, leadership has spanned the arc from "scraping by in the early years" to "a law school ranked among the world's best."

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# V. Today's scale and "the fiftieth anniversary"

• According to the official page^※, what began in 1969 as a single department has grown into a faculty of about 2,500 students and more than 80 full-time academic staff drawn from approximately 17 jurisdictions.
• According to a 2019 HKU press release^※, the Faculty of Law celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019, marking half a century with the "HKU Law at 50" series of events, including guided tours open to the public.

An easily missed "first": the first PhD in Law. HKU Law has trained academic researchers as well as practitioners. According to an official Faculty interview^※, Peter Wesley-Smith was the first scholar to earn a PhD in Law in HKU's history — a "first" achieved during the Faculty's own formative years around its elevation to full faculty status. Set alongside the "first" of the LLB/PCLL practice qualifications, it demonstrates that from the outset the Faculty ran two tracks simultaneously — "training practitioners" and "cultivating researchers" — rather than favouring one at the expense of the other.

A pragmatic reform of the PCLL. According to the official history page^※, Hong Kong conducted a Review of Legal Education and Training between 1999 and 2001, commonly known in the profession as the Redmond-Roper Review. Its conclusions drove a reform of the PCLL, shifting the curriculum's centre of gravity towards practical skills — drafting, litigation, conveyancing and the like — rather than the mere transmission of knowledge. That reform fixed the PCLL's position as the "bridge of pre-practice skills": the LLB/JD supplies the knowledge base, and the PCLL turns students into ready-to-go prospective practitioners (PCLL places, supply and demand, and recent data are discussed in section VII of deepdive-law.md).

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# Not found / To be verified (partially filled in)

• Official dates of the 1978 and 1984 elevations: the official history page dwells on the 1969 start and the programme ladder; "1978 School / 1984 Faculty" is drawn from Wikipedia, and the exact dates would need checking against University Archives.
• Key founding figure (now filled in): according to the Hong Kong Lawyer review of the faculty history^※, the pivotal figure in the founding was Professor Dafydd Evans — seconded from the LSE, he worked tirelessly to build a legal-education institution with a more robust structure, is described as "perhaps the most important single figure in the history of the Faculty," and served as head of department and subsequently dean until 1987, receiving an OBE in 1989 in recognition of his contribution to legal education. To mark the Faculty's fiftieth anniversary, HKU Press published the institutional history A Special Standing in the World: The Faculty of Law at The University of Hong Kong, 1969–2019, written by Dr. Christopher Munn from archives, publications and oral interviews. In six chapters it alternates between the Faculty's internal history and its part in shaping Hong Kong's modern legal system; the review notes that the Faculty's history "is to a very considerable extent the history of the modern law of Hong Kong" — the Faculty turned a "colonial legal backwater" into a thriving jurisdiction sustaining a common-law system under "one country, two systems," with its graduates now accounting for more than half of Hong Kong's judiciary and legal profession.
• Year-by-year student and staff figures: the official page gives a snapshot of the present; historical figures would require the University's annual reports.

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# VI. Half a century, measured: HKU Law in the judiciary and the profession

"Hong Kong's first law faculty" is no self-promotion; it is a fact measurable in specific seats and numbers. According to statistics on the Wikipedia entry as of September 2024^※, HKU law graduates occupy the following shares of Hong Kong's courts at various levels:

The higher the court, the greater the proportion of HKU law graduates. The same entry adds that alumni of the Faculty include the current Chief Justice of the Court of Final Appeal, three Permanent Judges of the Court of Final Appeal, three successive Secretaries for Justice, and roughly a third of the senior counsel; more than twenty former Executive Council and Legislative Council members also came through HKU Law. According to a 2024 speech by Mr. Justice Ribeiro, Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal, at the Faculty's 55th-anniversary celebration^※, the Faculty has grown since 1969 into an institution of pillar importance in Hong Kong's legal professional training system.

Two contributions written into the institutional history. According to the review of the history monograph^※, Christopher Munn's fiftieth-anniversary history A Special Standing in the World identifies two institutional contributions that are often overlooked: first, a hand in drafting and advocating for the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance; second, participation before 1997 in translating some 600 principal ordinances and over 1,000 subsidiary legislations into Chinese — an undertaking that gave academic and manpower support to a bilingual legal system. On this basis the review concludes that the Faculty's history "is to a very considerable extent the history of the modern law of Hong Kong."

Ranking evidence. According to an official HKU press release^※, in the 2026 QS World University Rankings by Subject (Law and Legal Studies), the HKU law discipline ranks 20th globally, having held for years a stable position in the world's top 15–25 — among the highest of Hong Kong's law schools and consistently near the top in Asia (the methodological background of yearly QS fluctuations is discussed in section IX of deepdive-law.md).

Entries concerning specific current judicial or government officials are, under BLP (biographies of living persons) policy and the division of governance work, assigned to the relevant modules. This article states only collective, faculty-level facts and names no serving officials.

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# VII. What "Hong Kong's first law faculty" really means

Calling HKU Law "Hong Kong's first law faculty" is not merely a matter of chronological sequence; it points to a substantive shift in the structure of Hong Kong's legal profession and the rule of law — worth unpacking.

Before 1969, Hong Kong's solicitors and barristers had almost all qualified through legal education and professional training overseas, principally in the United Kingdom. Two consequences followed. First, law was a highly overseas-dependent, high-barrier profession open only to those who could afford to study abroad. Second, locally trained legal talent was scarce, and could not meet the demands of a rapidly urbanising, commercialising Hong Kong. The founding of the HKU Department of Law upended this arrangement: it made "trained locally, practising locally" possible, and turned legal education from "a privilege of the elite who could go abroad" into "a professional path available at home."

Deeper still, from the very beginning the Faculty insisted on training lawyers in Hong Kong law, not English law alone. What looks like a technical choice was in fact momentous: it meant Hong Kong's legal talent would begin systematically to study, teach and develop local precedent and legislation rather than merely apply English models. In doing so, it laid the local human and intellectual foundations for Hong Kong's relatively mature and independent common-law system, and for the continuation of Hong Kong's legal order under "one country, two systems" after 1997. Seen this way, the Faculty's "first" is a cornerstone of the localisation of Hong Kong's rule of law — which is precisely why personnel decisions at the Faculty, such as the dean's involvement in the 2015 pro-vice-chancellor selection controversy (see ../13-governance-and-reform/pro-vice-chancellor-2015.md), attracted attention far beyond the campus.

Half a century on, that founding "first" has not faded; it has been re-confirmed institutionally again and again: the search for a home from Caine Road to the Cheng Yu Tung Tower; the governance change from two departments to the 2024 unitary structure; the progression from a borrowed University of London degree to a full LLB/JD/LLM ladder of its own. Every adjustment pushed the same main line further — completing, ever more thoroughly, in Hong Kong itself the two things of "legal education" and "legal practice." That is also why, when people ask how Hong Kong's common-law system survived 1997 and why the legal profession remained relatively stable through the handover, the five-decade history of HKU Law is routinely cited as an indispensable piece of institutional pre-history.

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