This book involves a variety of aspects and levels, including the diachronic and synchronic dimensions. Law profoundly affects our daily lives, but its language and culture can at times be nearly impossible to understand. As a comparative study of Chinese and Western legal language and legal culture, this book investigates the similarities and differences of both sides and identifies their respective advantages and disadvantages. Accordingly, it considers both social and cultural functions, and both theoretical and practical values. Firstly, the book addresses the differences, that is, the basic frameworks and disparities between the Chinese and Western legal languages and legal cultures. Secondly, it explores relevant changes over time, that is, the historical evolution and the basic driving forces that were at work before the Chinese and Western legal languages and cultures “met.” Lastly, the book elaborates on their fusion, that is, the conflicts and changes in Chinese and Western legal languages and cultures in China in the modern era, as well as the introduction, transplantation and transformation of Western legal culture.

This work focuses on the concepts of natural law, equity or justice, and right and responsibility in traditional Chinese law.

Professor Zhiping Liang offers a new understanding of Chinese legal tradition in this profoundly influential book. Unlike the available literature using the usual method of legal history research, this book attempts to illustrate ancient Chinese legal tradition through cultural interpretation. The author holds that both the concept and practice of law are meaningful cultural symbols. The law reveals not only the life pattern in a specific time and space but also the world of the mind of a specific group of people. Therefore, just as cultures have different types, laws embedded in different societies and cultures also have different characters and spirits. Believing that human experience is often condensed into concepts, categories, and classifications, the author begins his discussion with the analysis of relevant terms and then seeks to understand history by interpreting the interaction and interconnectedness of the words, ideas, and practices. Based on the same understanding, the author uses modern concepts reflectively and critically, consciously exploiting the differences between ancient and contemporary Chinese and Western concepts to achieve a more realistic understanding of history while avoiding the ethnocentrism and modern-centrism common in historical studies.

The U.S. has 400,000 lawyers in a society of 200 million people. China, a country with four times that population, has a mere 3,500 lawyers. How do the Chinese achieve law without lawyers? Victor Li, one of the world's leading authorities on Chinese law, explores the way the Chinese and U.S. systems have historically viewed law (and still view it), and the way each system functions in everyday life to shape conduct and control deviance. In a straightforward and highly readable manner, the author examines how these highly divergent societies operate. He writes about historical forces and cultural values that are centuries old—and that are still critical influences in shaping life in modern America and China. In explaining the differences in the tradition and operation of law in these two cultures, Li gives us both an invaluable understanding of Chinese society today and his own appraisal of the strengths and weaknesses of U.S. law, lawyers, and courts.

This inter-disciplinary volume brings together scholars from across the globe to challenge the dominant position of unjust enrichment and suggest more satisfactory alternatives. Rethinking Unjust Enrichment includes a broad range of voices from the UK, US, Australia, Canada, China, Singapore, Germany, Ireland, New Zealand, Hong Kong, and South America. The book includes voices of sceptics who think that the current unjust enrichment doctrine must be seriously qualified and others who think that it should be eliminated altogether. The contributions cast doubt on the various parameters of unjust enrichment from an analytical standpoint, representing four interrelated perspectives: history, sociology, doctrine, and theory. The four-limb structure of the book provides readers with a clear understanding of the current problems of unjust enrichment at the deepest levels of its history, sociological forces, doctrinal fallacies, and normative deficiencies. This treatment of the subject serves as the basis for a comprehensive reform across jurisdictions. Comprehensive and multi-faceted, Rethinking Unjust Enrichment is interesting to both sceptics and supporters of the unjust enrichment. It facilitates a critical and constructive dialogue between the two.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

China’s legal system is vast and complex, and robust scholarship on the subject is difficult to obtain. Inside China’s Legal System provides readers with a comprehensive look at the system including how it works in practice, theoretical and historical underpinnings, and how it might evolve. The first section of the book explains the Communist Party’s utilitarian approach to law: rule by law. The second section discusses Confucian and Legalist views on morality, law and punishment, and the influence such traditional Chinese thinking has on contemporary Chinese law. The third section focuses on the roles of key players (including judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and legal academics) in the Chinese legal system. The fourth section offers Chinese legal case studies in civil, criminal, administrative, and international law. The book concludes with a comparison of China’s fundamental governing and legal principles with those of the United States, in such areas as checks and balances, separation of powers, and due process. Uses extensive legal materials and historical documents generally unavailable to Western based academics Gives insider knowledge, including first-hand experience teaching law, and close involvement with judges, attorneys, and law professors in China Analyses legal issues from historical and cultural perspectives holistically