By James T. Areddy

Jerome A. Cohen was never sure what in his background triggered his unconventional decision in 1960 to specialize in Chinese law. Perhaps, he said, it was a desire to shape global affairs after living through World War II, or a quote he heard from Confucius, or maybe just watching his mother play mahjong as a child in the 1930s. "Was it the clack of the tiles that really attracted me?" he wondered.

Whatever the reason, he spotted China ascendancy early, and spent decades influencing its legal, trade and human-rights policies.

Cohen died Monday at age 95, according to his son Ethan Cohen.

Cohen had been firmly on track toward a promising constitutional law career in 1960 after graduating from Yale Law School, clerking for two Supreme Court justices and holding other legal jobs. Then at age 30, he made his abrupt dive into Chinese law, including learning Mandarin, leaving colleagues to scratch their heads over what might be gained from studying an enemy nation that Americans couldn't visit. But by the late 1970s, Cohen was the first American lawyer practicing in Beijing -- and suddenly ahead of the curve.

"I'm taking part in history," Cohen recalled in "Life, Law and Asia," a video autobiography from his years representing the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard Law School, New York University and law firms in China.

When relations warmed, Cohen helped shape American attitudes toward China, and with a genteel manner -- bow ties and a mustache that later turned white -- he regularly prodded Beijing for its legal-system failings and inconsistencies, especially state control over lawyers. A speedy writer with a sharp memory even late into life, he wrote books, speeches, commentaries and reviews that called for the U.S. to drop diplomatic ties with Taiwan in the early 1970s and more recently highlighted creeping authoritarianism under President Xi Jinping, according to a list maintained by NYU.

A career gamble

The son of a New Jersey attorney, Cohen did a brief stint as a corporate lawyer after his Supreme Court clerkships, and was getting his feet wet as a professor at Berkeley when grant money was set aside to train a Chinese legal scholar. It was his job to find someone who would accept the position, but no one wanted it. Where others saw a financial dead end, Cohen recognized a chance to travel. "The big gamble was, would we ever have good relations with China?" he said.

Cohen's new position took him to Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1960s, and he cooked up a series of unsuccessful gambits to gain an invitation from Beijing to visit mainland China, which had had closed relations to Western countries for decades. As part of the effort, he had spread word while in Hong Kong that he could pay $20,000 to buy a giant panda. Later, Cohen sent a letter to Mao Zedong asking permission to visit. After not hearing back, he wrote to the Chinese leader's deputy Zhou Enlai -- and when the two finally met in 1972 in Beijing, Mr. Cohen ribbed the Chinese official that he still hadn't received a reply.

"I had this terrible thirst for contact with Chinese people," he said.

After the U.S. and China formally re-established diplomatic relations in 1979, Cohen, by then with Harvard, was invited to spend a year in Beijing lecturing officials, and he moved into a suite at the Peking Hotel with his wife, Joan Lebold Cohen, who built a career as an art historian.

There, he also hung out a shingle, at a time when China's own lawyers still hadn't been rehabilitated after Mao's Cultural Revolution. "All of a sudden multinational corporations wanted to get into China with all kinds of wildly ambitious plans," Cohen said.

Follow your own law

As American businesses ventured into China, some of their executives inevitably got into legal trouble, and Cohen began navigating its opaque criminal justice system. "I wasn't telling them to follow American law," he said, recalling how in the 1990s he traveled to a remote city in the northeast to press prosecutors to release a company's chief financial officer being held on flimsy charges. "I was telling them, follow your own criminal procedure," he said.

In 2012, Cohen helped defuse a major Sino-American rift involving his friend, Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese lawyer who had fled to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing after escaping house arrest by government captors punishing him for defending human-rights causes. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton happened to be visiting Beijing at the time, and Cohen's idea was that NYU would invite Chen to the school, providing Beijing a face-saving way to let Chen leave the country.

Cohen credited both governments for an "exciting, low-key, dignified" solution (although once Chen and his family were in the U.S. and out of harm's way, it got more complicated, with Chen turning critical of both NYU and Cohen).

During a Journal interview in May 2024, Cohen was trying to remain optimistic that, despite a sustained downdraft in bilateral ties, Washington and Beijing were likely to eventually work through their troubles. "Nothing stands still for long," Cohen said. "We may be in a period of transition without even knowing it."

Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com

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September 23, 2025 11:18 ET (15:18 GMT)

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