On June 2, the 2024 Legal Writing Competition for Graduate Students of Law Degree, hosted by Xiamen University School of Law and co-organised by Fujian Tianheng Joint Law Firm, with the Research Association of Legal Education of China Law Society and National Steering Committee of Graduate Education for Legal Degree as the academic guiding units, came to a successful end. Sun Mingyue, a graduate student of Master of Law (LL.M.) of our college in grade 2023, stood out among many competitors and won the first prize of the 2024 Legal Document Writing Competition for Graduate Students of Legal Degree!
The Competition, which is based on legal document writing, is divided into three stages: preliminary round, rematch and final round, and the judges include senior experts and scholars from universities as well as business backbones of practical departments. The preliminary round of the competition was completed by announcing the test questions on the official website and submitting the articles online, which attracted 3,084 outstanding students from 211 colleges and universities across the country to participate in the competition. After a fierce competition, a total of 83 contestants entered into the rematch and were required to complete the writing of a legal document within three hours in online mode. Sun Mingyue, a student from our college, entered the final round with excellent results and wrote a legal document in a time-limited manner at the final round. No internet resources were allowed to be used in both the final and the review, which fully tested the professional knowledge and writing ability of the contestants. After anonymous evaluation by the expert jury, 2 first prizes, 6 second prizes, 7 third prizes, 15 excellence prizes and 5 best organisation prizes were finally selected. Our student Sun Mingyue won the first prize!
This is the second time for our students to win the national first prize after Zhang Xiaohan won the first prize in the National Legal Writing Competition for Postgraduates of Professional Degree in Law in 2022, which is another landmark achievement for the cultivation of Master of Laws (LLM)! Since the announcement of the competition, our college has attached great importance to it, actively mobilised and planned it as a whole, inviting experts from inside and outside the college to provide pre-competition counselling and paperwork reviews for the registered students at the preliminary stage, and deploying pre-competition guidance in an all-around and detailed way at the stage of the resumed and final rounds, inviting experts from the practical departments to give one-on-one explanations to enhance the students' legal paper writing ability from the perspectives of theoretical knowledge, methods and approaches, and practical solutions. Writing ability.
Our institute will cherish the honour, make persistent efforts, attach great importance to the training and cultivation of LLM's legal writing ability, constantly broaden the channels for improving LLM's practical ability, continue to explore and promote the reform of LLM's practical teaching, and cultivate high-quality reserve talents of the rule of law for the comprehensive rule of law and the construction of a modern socialist country on the track of the rule of law.
Sun Mingyue's acceptance speech
Dear leaders and teachers, dear friends of the contestants, good morning to you all! I am Sun Mingyue from Southeast University. Today, as a representative of the contestants of this year's Law Degree Postgraduate Clerical Competition, I am overwhelmed with excitement as I stand here to share my achievements with you.
First of all, I would like to thank the Academic Guidance Unit, the National Steering Committee for Postgraduate Legal Education, the Research Society for Legal Education of the China Law Society, the organiser, Xiamen University School of Law, as well as the co-organisers for providing a valuable platform for the contestants from various colleges and universities across the country to show their skills and learn from each other. Secondly, I would like to thank all the teachers and volunteers who worked hard in front of and behind the stage to ensure a comfortable and stable competition environment from the preliminary rounds to the final rounds.
When the competition was officially launched, Dean Ouyang Benqi and Associate Dean Xiong Zhanglin of Southeast University School of Law attached great importance to the competition, and invited a number of teachers from both inside and outside the university to train the students and provide them with targeted advice on how to revise their documents. During the process, I realised my problems in writing legal documents and was able to improve on the quality questions provided by the competition, learning to combine theoretical knowledge with practical cases. In the resumption and final rounds, Southeast University School of Law invited a number of practical experts, such as Wang Weidong from Jiangsu Shengdian Law Firm and Zhang Jiowen from Jiangsu Zhibang Law Firm, to provide me with several training sessions on writing legal documents, which enabled me to gain an in-depth understanding of the purpose of writing various types of legal documents, writing norms and key points of writing in a compact time frame for preparation for the competition. The rigorous and serious attitude of the instructors also made me realise the noble mission of the legal profession and the unremitting pursuit of justice.
As an important record and display of judicial activities, legal documents are an important manifestation of the practical level of our legal talents. Through the three rounds of this competition, I deeply appreciate the charm and challenge of legal document writing, and also have a more in-depth and specific understanding of legal document writing. In the following, I would like to briefly talk about some of the more important points that I have learnt from the whole legal writing competition:
First, the legal search ability. An excellent legal document is never in the air, but requires a large amount of accurate information as support. In the preliminary round, the requirements of the competition did not restrict the use of Internet resources, which means that we can read the questions given in the competition, refine keywords, conduct legal searches in major legal databases to ensure the correct application of the law, and by extracting the core issues of the case for case searches for us to obtain the case of the breakthrough point of entry. I believe that whether you are a novice or an experienced legal practitioner, the legal search will run through our entire legal career.
Secondly, logical and analytical skills. The competition examined a variety of types of documents, including criminal and civil judgements, but also administrative agency, public opinion, but I believe that all types of documents are essentially a process of argumentation, the need for logical analysis skills as the underlying foundation. This requires us to do a good job in the usual accumulation of basic knowledge of the law, read widely and learn the writing of excellent legal instruments ideas. In the specific writing instruments, combined with the characteristics of the case, when the complexity of the complex, when the simple is simple, optimise the structure of the chapter, layer by layer analysis, to enhance the article's legal persuasive power.
Third, the ability to reason. Legal documents are not only a bridge of communication between lawyers, but also assume the role of resolving conflicts and disputes by the rule of law and enhancing the acceptability of the people. Therefore, in the judgement and other legal instruments in the process of writing, not only to use the French language, but also to the matter, jurisprudence, reasoning, so that the parties involved in the case not only to solve the legal knot and solve the knot.
In addition, I believe that our study of the law should not be limited to memory and recapitulation, but should go deeper into its spirit, to understand its value. On the road of law, we should not only stick to the principles, but also use the law as a tool to perceive the temperature of the society, listen to the voice of the people, apply the knowledge of the law to solve the practical problems, and contribute to the construction of a more just and harmonious society with our knowledge and enthusiasm.
Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Dean Ouyang Benqi and Vice Dean Xiong Zhanglin of the Law School of Southeast University, all the tutors and my mentor, Mr Xing Chenxi, for their care and support, the valuable help provided by all the external instructing practice experts, as well as the encouragement I received from my family and friends! Once again, I would like to thank the organising committee of the competition for their recognition, and I am honoured to be here with all the contestants, so that we can work hard together to become outstanding legal professionals! Thank you all!
(Sun Mingyue)