""Perhaps more than any other civilian, Jerome Cohen has shaped the United States encounters with East Asia in the twentieth century. The founder of the study of Chinese law in America, Cohen has been a scholar and political activist for more than sixty years-a mentor to Taiwanese presidents and an interceder in several geopolitical crises. In this autobiography, Cohen will describe his front-row seat to the practice and study of Sino-American relations over the last half a century. After Jerry Cohen joined the faculty of Berkeley School of Law in 1959, he accepted a four-year grant to study China offered by the Rockefeller Foundation. As no Americans were permitted to enter China at the time, he could only travel as far as Hong Kong, where he met with refugees and questioned them on Chinese criminal procedure. These interviews served as the basis for his landmark book, ""The Criminal Process of the People's Republic of China: 1949-1963."" He returned to America in 1964 and became a professor at Harvard, where he created the school's East Asia Legal Studies Association. During this time, Cohen became an activist for normalized relations with China, and was influential in securing the release of John T. Downey in the early 1970s. In 1977, he accompanied Senator Ted Kennedy to Beijing where they met with Deng Xiaoping. Following China's economic reforms in 1979, Cohen's obscure specialty of Chinese law was thrust into the spotlight as foreign companies began to consider investment opportunities. When he was offered the opportunity to live and practice in Beijing in exchange for teaching American contract law to commerce officials, Cohen took a sabbatical from Harvard. Following the suppression of student uprising in Tiananmen Square in 1989, he returned to the United States and became a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law in 1990. Over the course of his career, he has been a tireless advocate for human rights. He worked legal reforms in China and was instrumental in realizing the release of political prisoners, including Song Yongyi, a librarian at Dickinson College. He also assisted Chinese civil rights activist Chen Guangcheng after he escaped house arrest in 2012. Cohen regularly uses his bi-weekly column in the South China Morning Post as a platform to criticize rights violations in China and Taiwan.""--