What a life Jerome Cohen has led: Modest New Jersey roots. An education in law at Yale. Clerkships with Supreme Court justices Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter. Practicing and teaching law, both in the United States and China. Pioneering the study of Chinese law in the U.S. Playing a material role in the modern opening of China and in opening business law practice in China thereafter. Founding important centers for the study of Chinese and East Asian law at both Harvard and New York University.

Cohen’s beautifully written and at times dramatic autobiography, Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law (Columbia University Press, 2025), tells this story, which includes the author’s distinguished record of action and eloquence in support of human rights across Asia. The tone is personal and direct. One feels as if one were at the table with the author relating bits of a rich life, often with a twinkle in his eye.

Cohen’s life has largely centered on China, a complex and extraordinarily productive civilization. He has improved our understanding of China’s legal traditions and modern law, which are rightly thought to have played key roles in fostering that productivity.

Climactic moments in Cohen’s memoir include his role in saving the life of Kim Dae-Jung, the Nobel prize-winning advocate for democracy in Korea; freeing the progressive Taiwanese leader Annette Lu; prosecuting the assassins of Chinese expatriate journalist Henry Liu; and befriending Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese “barefoot lawyer,” and helping him and his family move to the U.S. The book is enormously readable and often joyful. The narrative is founded in a powerful respect for the peoples with whom he was engaged and a belief in the ability to emerge improved after difficult times.

Cohen, now 94, and his wife, Joan, have owned a house in Truro for almost 60 years and are well known in the community. While the title of Eastward, Westward does not refer to our ocean and bayside beaches, there are a few local flashes in its pages, as in this passage about an August 1973 phone call: “As we entered our Truro house, the phone was ringing. It was Kissinger, who was apologetic about the delay. I said: ‘Henry, they’re going to kill Kim [Dae-Jung], and there’s no time to delay.’ ”

Cohen’s years as a Supreme Court clerk in 1955 and 1956 were formative. Earl Warren was focused on procedural rights and due process for the average citizen. “I personally liked Warren’s emphasis on protecting procedural justice,” Cohen writes. “He showed considerable concern not only for curbing what he deemed unfair government restrictions on due process for accused criminals but also for condemning unfair administrative practices in the federal government’s handling of controversial cases spawned by the turbulent political climate of the postwar era.”

The author’s early interest in American criminal law focused on these issues. His later work studying the modern law of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea, and the varied sources of and influences on this law, including Soviet Russian law, German law, and earlier domestic legal systems, likewise focused on procedural issues and the rights of those under investigation or under arrest. Cohen’s efforts to enforce the domestic procedural and due process rights of citizens in China, Taiwan, Korea, and elsewhere evince the spirit of the Warren Court.

Describing a mid-1970s visit with Kim Dae-Jung, then under house arrest in Seoul and closely monitored by the Korean CIA, Cohen writes that they “sat together on his living room couch and used a Magic Slate, a child’s toy writing pad, to exchange messages, lifting the translucent sheet each time we reached its end, which wiped out what we had written.”

Ever discreet, Cohen adds, “I was amazed how well this gimmick worked.”

Parts of the book are scholarly. He provides an excellent introduction to modern American scholarship of Chinese history and law. Cohen tells us that reading the masterful works of Joseph Levenson “was not easy. Every sentence was richly worked, virtually baroque or rococo in its jewel-like embellishments. I had to rest every ten pages or so.” So true.

The book is frank on many topics, not least the severe pressures the author’s career and travel placed on Joan and their family. An unprecedented two-week trip to North Korea in the summer of 1972, for example, was anything but easy. Close management by government handlers, photography restrictions, and restrictions on contact with anyone other than selected North Koreans were nerve-wracking. When the opportunity to return arose in 1997, the author went but Joan declined: “She wouldn’t dream of a second trip.”

The book opens with an expression of gratitude to Joan Lebold Cohen and their extended family. Celebrations of Joan’s own scholarship on Chinese art and photography and of the contributions of other members of their family are among the pleasures of this volume.

In one of the closing chapters, Cohen addresses the question of whether helping China build its own post-1978 legal system was a mistake. He reviews the arguments, his own experiences, and some alternative scenarios and concludes, not surprisingly, that his efforts were not in vain.

His reasoning is this: Whether in China or in the U.S., the current order is not cast in stone. Describing himself as “an inveterate optimist,” Cohen writes: “I am not as depressed as many of my fellow foreign China-watchers are. Perhaps that is because I began my studies before the decade of the Cultural Revolution, managed to weather those ten bad years, and then felt vindicated when Deng Xiaoping led the enlightened reaction that I had predicted would be inevitable and that enabled me briefly to play a role in the nation’s legal progress.”

Expressing an optimism that this reviewer finds fully as apt in the U.S. of today as in the various countries of East Asia, Cohen states, “China under the PRC has developed in pendulum-like fashion. We are now witnessing another extreme in the pendulum’s swing toward repression. Xi Jinping is very likely to outlive me but ‘no life lives forever,’ and there will eventually be another profound reaction to the current totalitarian era.”