The news came on a Wednesday morning in September, which is when most things that matter in Hong Kong happen, on a weekday, while everyone is working. The government announced it would build an international commercial court. Judges from other common law jurisdictions would sit on the bench. Cross-border business disputes would be heard under procedures designed for speed and clarity. There would be a new international legal affairs complex, a training academy for legal talent from Belt and Road countries, expanded arbitration for maritime and IP and sports disputes, and a regulatory framework for mediation that would make Hong Kong a global capital for resolving arguments without burning the building down.

I read the announcement twice. Not because it was complicated. Because I was trying to imagine the paragraph that would appear in the Western press the next morning, the one that would explain to its readers how a city with no rule of law had just announced plans to invite judges from around the world to come and practice law inside it. This is the story about the Hong Kong courtroom that should not exist.

I grew up in Adams, Massachusetts, a town where the tallest thing for miles was Mount Greylock and the second tallest was the confidence of people who had never left the county but were certain they understood how the rest of the world worked. Adams did not have an international commercial court. Adams had a town hall with a leaky roof and a zoning board that met during the second week of the month. But Adams did teach me something about the distance between what people say about a place and what the place actually does, because for twenty years after the mills closed, the Berkshire Eagle ran stories about the town’s decline while the people inside it kept opening diners and fixing cars and coaching Little League and doing all the things that a living town does when nobody is looking.

Hong Kong’s legal system is the diner that will not close. The Western press has been writing its obituary since 2020, and the diner keeps serving breakfast.

Six days before the Five-Year Plan dropped, a Hong Kong magistrate convicted Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, of preventing a reporter from exercising her statutory right to stand for office in a registered trade union. The reporter, Selina Cheng, had been elected chair of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. Her employer told her she needed permission to run for the position, permission that would have been denied, and made clear she would not remain employed if she took the role. The magistrate found that this constituted an unjustified deterrent of her rights under the Trade Unions Ordinance. Dow Jones was convicted on the first charge and acquitted on the second, which alleged retaliatory dismissal, because the court could not rule out a genuine corporate restructuring beyond a reasonable doubt.

I was the instructing solicitor on that case. I should disclose that up front, because everything I am about to say flows from it.

A Hong Kong court convicted one of the most powerful media companies on earth of violating the labor rights of a journalist. The company that publishes the Wall Street Journal, that employs reporters who write stories about the erosion of the rule of law in Hong Kong, was itself found to have broken Hong Kong law. And the legal system that supposedly no longer functions is the one that held them to account.

Nobody at the Washington Post editorial board called to congratulate the Hong Kong judiciary on its independence. Nobody at the New York Times ran a feature about how a city without rule of law had just demonstrated, in open court, that its labor protections apply to multinational corporations the same way they apply to the noodle shop on the corner. The conviction happened. The press filed their stories. And then, with the practiced agility of people who have been ignoring inconvenient facts for six years, they moved on.

Ruth was at the kitchen table when I got home that evening. She was eating congee and reading something on her phone that had nothing to do with any of this. I told her about the verdict. She looked up, held the spoon midway between the bowl and her mouth, and said, “The system worked. Go eat something.” Then she went back to her congee.

She was right. The system worked. The same system that the op-ed pages keep telling you is broken.

Consider the trajectory. On September 7, 2026, nine days before the Five-Year Plan announcement, Justice Russell Coleman’s promotion to the Court of Appeal took effect. Coleman is the judge who, among other things, struck down regulations affecting transgender bathroom access and ordered the government to review its own laws. He ruled in favor of a lesbian couple’s parental recognition of their IVF-conceived son. He ruled against the government’s flagship plan to build 12,000 public housing flats on the Fanling golf course, finding the environmental approval process flawed, a decision the Court of Appeal subsequently upheld. He served as the judge in charge of the Constitutional and Administrative Law List, the most politically sensitive judicial assignment in Hong Kong, handling every major challenge between citizens and the state. And then they promoted him.

If you are running an authoritarian judiciary, you do not promote the judge who keeps telling the government it is wrong. You promote the one who keeps telling it what it wants to hear. Coleman’s record is the record of a judge whose independence is not a talking point but a pattern, visible in the cases, traceable through the judgments, and confirmed by the institution that elevated him despite knowing exactly what he would continue to do on the bench.

And then there is Judge Patti Saris. A Clinton appointee, recommended by Ted Kennedy and John Kerry, former Chief Judge of the District of Massachusetts, Obama’s pick to chair the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the judge who mentored a young law clerk named Ketanji Brown Jackson. In 2024, Saris dismissed an American employee’s claims against his Hong Kong employer, finding Hong Kong to be the more appropriate forum. The First Circuit affirmed. A sitting American federal judge, with credentials that would satisfy every editorial board in the country, looked at Hong Kong’s legal system and told an American citizen: go use it. At the exact moment the State Department was telling the world the opposite.

If the rule of law is dead, why are American courts still sending American citizens to Hong Kong’s courts to resolve their disputes? If the system is rigged, why did it promote the judge whose primary contribution to the bench has been telling the government it is wrong?

The questions answer themselves if you let them.

Now Hong Kong is building an international commercial court. Think about what that means structurally. The city is not circling the wagons. It is opening the gates. It is inviting judges from other common law jurisdictions to sit on its bench, to hear cross-border disputes, to apply commercial law in proceedings that will be scrutinized by every law firm and every multinational and every sovereign wealth fund doing business in the region. You do not invite outside judges into your courtroom unless you are confident in the courtroom. You do not build an international legal affairs complex and a training academy for Belt and Road legal talent unless you believe the product you are selling is real. The announcement is not defensive. It is expansive. It is the legal equivalent of a city that just posted 5.1 percent GDP growth in the first half of 2026 deciding that the best response to its critics is not argument but construction.

I have a thought about the new court that I want to put on the record, and I want to be clear that what follows is offered with the appropriate degree of humility, which for a lawyer from Adams, Massachusetts, is approximately twelve percent more humility than I naturally possess.

I am dually qualified. I hold a practicing certificate in Hong Kong and I trained in the United States. I studied constitutional law at Boston University. I have spent over a decade practicing in this city. I was the instructing solicitor on the case that convicted Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, in a Hong Kong court. I was lead counsel in the matter where a sitting U.S. federal judge, with impeccable credentials and a direct line to the Supreme Court through her own protege, found Hong Kong’s legal system perfectly adequate for an American citizen’s dispute. I have appeared before Justice Coleman. He has ruled for me. He has ruled against me. I know what judicial independence looks like from the inside of a courtroom, which is the only place it can be reliably observed.

If the government is looking for people who can credibly sit in an international commercial court, people who understand both systems, who have demonstrated in practice that Hong Kong’s judiciary operates with fairness and rigor, who can speak to the common law tradition from both sides of the Pacific, I would respectfully suggest that the pool of candidates includes at least one lawyer from a small town in the Berkshires who has spent the last few years proving the Western narrative wrong, case by case, in the courts where it actually matters.

That is not a campaign speech. It is a resume summary. And the resume is written in judgments, not adjectives.

In Adams, there was a man named Albert who ran the hardware store on Summer Street for forty years, probably more. Albert never advertised. He never put a sign in the window that said “Best Hardware Store in the Berkshires.” He just opened the door every morning at seven, knew where every bolt was, and fixed what needed fixing. When someone asked him why he never promoted the business, he said, “The shelves are stocked. The door is open. What else is there to say?”

Hong Kong’s legal system is Albert’s hardware store. The shelves are stocked. The door is open. The court just convicted a multinational corporation. The appellate bench just added a judge who has spent his career telling the government when it is wrong. An American federal judge just told an American citizen that Hong Kong’s courts are perfectly capable of handling his case. And now the government is building an international commercial court and inviting the world to come see for itself.

What else is there to say?

Ruth would say something. She would say it in five words or fewer, probably while slicing a mango, and it would be the only sentence anyone remembered from this entire piece. But Ruth is not here right now. She is in the other room, doing something that has nothing to do with international commercial litigation, and she has not offered her opinion, which means she either agrees with everything I have written or considers it beneath comment. With Ruth, both possibilities carry the same weight.

The court is coming. The building is coming. The judges from other jurisdictions are coming. The Western press will call it a performance, a facade, a show trial in reverse. They will write this from newsrooms whose own publisher was just convicted in the very courts they claim do not function, for violating a reporter’s rights under Hong Kong law.

The system works. The door is open. The diner is still serving breakfast.