Wang shows how the law in China is conceptually reconfigured and instrumentally employed to shore up an illiberal authoritarian regime.

How can the law be employed pragmatically to facilitate development and underpin illiberal principles? The case of contemporary China shows that the law plays an increasingly important role in the country's illiberal approach to both domestic and China-related global affairs, which has posed intellectual challenges in understanding it with reference to conventional, Western legal concepts and theories. This book provides a systematic exploration of the sources of Chinese law as pragmatically reconfigured in context, aiming to fill the gap between written and practised law. In combination with fieldwork investigations, it conceptualises various formal and informal laws, including the Constitution, congressional statutes, supreme court interpretations, judicial documents, guiding cases and judicial precedents. Moreover, it engages a theoretical analysis of legal instrumentalism, illuminating how and why the law works as an instrument for authoritarian legality in China, with international reflections on other comparable regimes.

The effect of the law on human behavior is contemporary society?nothing less is the concern of this important book. It is curious that scholars in psychology and law have largely neglected this topic because studies of the effects of law on behavior may have much to teach about the role of social regulation in human motivation more generally. Similarly, such studies may offer jurisprudential scholars new ways of thinking about the role of law in human experience.øHere seven leading experts on law and the social sciences discuss the contributions their research c an make to the legal system. Concerned with the relationship between the law and both individual and group behavior, they examine the law as an instrument of social stasis and social change and as an element of personal motivation. The result is a major step toward the development of a psychology of jurisprudence. The scope of this book is in the best tradition of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation and a fitting celebration of the tenth anniversary of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln?s Law/Psychology Program, the first integrated graduate training program in psycho-legal studies. Drawing from law, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy, the contributors take a truly interdisciplinary approach to understanding the instrumentality of law.

"Questions about the nature of law, its relationship with custom, and the form of legal rules, categories and claims, are placed at the centre of this challenging, yet accessible, introduction. Anthropology of law is presented as a distinctive subject within the broader field of legal anthropology, suggesting new avenues of inquiry for the anthropologist, while also bringing empirical studies within the ambit of legal scholarship.