New Directions in the Study of Vietnamese Law
Michigan Journalof InternationalLaw
Michigan Journal of International Law
Mark Sidel 0 1
0 University of Iowa College of Law , USA
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Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons Recommended Citation Mark Sidel, New Directions in the Study of Vietnamese Law, 17 MICH. J. INT'L L. 705 (1996). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjil/vol17/iss3/6
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VIETNAM AND THE RULE OF LAW (Carlyle A. Thayer & David G. Man
eds.). Canberra: Australian National University, 1993. 189 pp.
Reviewed by Mark Sidel*
Interest is burgeoning in Vietnamese law. For forty years that interest
has risen and fallen in waves influenced by politics, economics, and war.
Today, for the first time in several decades, scholars outside and within
Vietnam have the opportunity for textured study of a rapidly changing
system and to make the study of Vietnamese law a topic of real scholarly
interest.
It was certainly not always so. Hanoi-based foreign study of
Vietnamese law - the law of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV)
and now Socialist Republic of Vietnam - has long been weak and
fragmented. That is not surprising. The history of law in Vietnam and of
its study abroad since the founding of the DRV in 1945 has been marked
by Communist Party domination, weak domestic legal scholarship within
Vietnam, dependence of Vietnamese legal studies on the understanding
of authoritarian politics in North Vietnam, lack of interest in Europe and
the United States in Southeast Asian law, and other factors.
It is assumed sometimes that there was virtually no attention paid to
Vietnamese law by scholars outside Vietnam between the founding of the
DRV and increased interest in trade with and investment in Vietnam
which began in the late 1980s. In fact, international attention has been
devoted to the study of Vietnamese law since the period of French
control in the first half of this century and since the founding of the
North Vietnamese state in 1945. However, initial efforts in the field were
marked by formalism and fragmentation and were not sustained.'
* Lecturer in Law, University of Iowa College of Law; Research Associate, Center for
International and Comparative Studies, University of Iowa. Consultant to The Ford Foundation
and to the American Counsel of Learned Societies '(Vietnam) (September 1995-present);
Program Officer for Vietnam, The Ford Foundation (1992-1995).
The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance and support of Bill Alford, Mary Jane
Ballou, Peter Geithner, Minh Kauffman, Kelli Emtairah, Sunanthana Kampanathsanyakom,
David Mart, Ann Palmer, Nguyen Xuan Phong, Pimpa Molkul, Sisamorn Plengsri, Margaret
Raymond, Gene Smith, Ta Vfn Thi, David Thomas, Viet-Huong Kurtz, Tran Bich Van, Lan
Vu and Mary Zurbuchen.
1. Useful bibliographies of foreign writing on Vietnamese law include Barbara G. James,
Vietnamese Law in English:A Selected Annotated Bibliography, 84 L. LIBR. J. 461 (1992), and
the bibliography which appears in the volume under review, VIETNAM AND THE RULE OF LAW
I. STAGES IN A FIELD
A. The Contributionsof the Formalistsin the 1950s and 1960s
The modem era of foreign scholarship on Vietnamese law outside
Vietnam began when Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces recaptured Hanoi
from the French in 1954. In the years which followed, several writers
explored the structures of law under the Viet Minh regime (1945-1954)
and in the early years of the DRV (1954-1976). In the 1950s and early
1960s, American writer Bernard Fall wrote some of the strongest works
on the newly emerging, weak, Party-dominated Vietnamese legal system.2
In a series of book chapters and articles, Fall described and began a
preliminary analysis of the legal structures of the DRV.3
2. Bernard Fall was based in France and the United States for many years and served
during the 1960s as Professor of International Relations at Howard University in Washington,
D.C. He died in 1967; killed by a landmine while on patrol with the U.S. Marine Corps on the
"Street Without Joy" outside Danang. Some of Professor Fall's papers are available at the John
F. Kennedy Library at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
3. These works include BERNARD FALL, VIET-NAM WITNESS 1953-1966 (1966);
BERNARD FALL, THE VIET-MINH REGIME: GOVERNMENT AND ADMINISTRATION IN THE
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF VIET-NAM
(Greenwood Press and Southeast Asia Programs, Cornell
University 1975)
(1956); BERNARD FALL, THE Two VIET-NAMS: A POLITICAL AND MILITARY
ANALYSIS (1967); Bernard Fall, Constitution-Writingin a Communist State: The New
Constitution (...truncated)