American legal scholar, widely called the father of Chinese legal studies in America. He died on September 22nd 2025, aged 95.
Mr Cohen became interested in China partly because of America's "red scare" of the 1950s, which had denuded the ranks of China experts. He left a promising academic path in American law for a fellowship in Chinese law. He transformed what had been an arid, text-heavy field into a living, breathing one, drawing on extensive interviews with refugees from mainland China in Hong Kong to write a seminal book on Chinese criminal law. He completed it soon after Mao's Cultural Revolution erupted—timing that gave him a measure of stoicism about China's political pendulum swings.
On his first visit in 1972 Mr Cohen was invited to dinner with Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong's lieutenant. Rather than stick to pleasantries, he pressed Zhou to release Jack Downey, his former college classmate imprisoned for espionage two decades earlier (Downey was released in 1973), to start sending students to America, and to join the International Court of Justice.
A few years before Henry Kissinger's secret mission to Beijing in 1971, Mr Cohen and a small group of fellow academics drafted a confidential memorandum laying out why Sino-American rapprochement made sense and how to achieve it—planting a seed for the modern phase of relations between the two countries.
In the 1980s he left academia to practise as one of the first foreign lawyers in China, representing giant American companies that invested during the country's high-growth years. He stood out among corporate lawyers for his simultaneous advocacy for human rights. He helped secure the release of Annette Lu, his former student at Harvard, who was imprisoned under Taiwan's then-authoritarian regime.
After the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 Mr Cohen became increasingly outspoken about China's repression. He returned to academia at New York University, where he hosted lawyers and campaigners from China and beyond. He helped arrange schooling at NYU for Chen Guangcheng, a blind lawyer and activist. In recent years he denounced the Chinese Communist Party's crackdown in Hong Kong, its repression in Xinjiang and its crushing of independent lawyers.
Despite his criticisms, Mr Cohen held a patient long view. In a memoir published months before his death, he wrote of Xi Jinping's authoritarian revival: "His rule will not last for ever, and one can then expect another swing of the political pendulum toward a more moderate polity." He liked to end speeches critical of China by quoting the title of a popular Taiwanese song from the 1980s: "Tomorrow will be even better."
The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it's cheaper than institutionalizing all those people.