Li's "Translating Weimar"

[We have the following announcement from our friends at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory of a new open access publication in its series, Global Perspectives on Legal History.  DRE]

Fupeng Li, Translating Weimar: The Cultural Translation of the Weimar Constitution in China (1919-1949).  Global Perspectives on Legal History. Vol. 28

How can a constitution imagine social revolution? This book answers this question by placing social rights at the center of the Weimar Constitution's long journey to China. It tells a global legal history of how jurists and legislators used constitutional language to conceptualize 20th-century projects of social transformation.

Moving between Germany and China, the book follows the Weimarer Reichsverfassung as it was read, translated, and rewritten by Chinese actors. Rather than treating the Weimar Constitution's influence as a simple "reception" of foreign ideas, it reconstructs how Chinese jurists used debates on labor, welfare, and economic order to rethink what a social constitution could be - and what kind of social revolution it might legitimately guide.

At the core of the analysis lies a structural shift: from the Weimar Constitution's rights-based model of social order to the policy-oriented constitutionalism that came to characterize modern China. Drawing on multilingual archives and constitutional drafts, the study traces how the Weimar Constitution's catalog of fundamental social rights was progressively reframed as Fundamental National Policies, transforming social rights into state programs, planning targets, and ideological commitments.

Organized around the triad of space, time, and tradition, the book maps the routes by which German Staatsrechtslehre and the Weimar Constitution's concept of social rights entered Chinese debates, shows how they were positioned within changing temporal narratives of crisis and revolution, and examines how they were negotiated in the encounter with Confucian statecraft, revolutionary nationalism, and socialist planning. In doing so, it offers a new framework for understanding how constitutions mediate social revolution through the cultural translation of rights into policies.

The book will interest scholars and students of constitutional law, global legal history, and modern Chinese history who seek to understand how social rights traveled across borders - and how, in the process, they quietly remade the meaning of both "constitution" and "revolution" in the 20th century.

CFP: International Society for Chinese Law and History

[Via H-Law, we have the following CFP.  DRE]

Call for Proposals: The Seventh Biennial Conference of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH)

Theme: “Chinese Law in Motion: Change, Practice, Circulation, and Continuity.”  Wuhan, China, June 18-19, 2027.  Proposal submission link: ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference Submission System.  Submission Deadline: August 31, 2026.

The International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH), established in 2014, is the leading international hub for Chinese legal historians, boasting approximately 150 members worldwide. The society organizes workshops in North America and biennial conferences in Asia. To date, ISCLH has successfully organized four in-person biennial conferences, with co-sponsorship of Fudan University (Shanghai, 2015), China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing, 2017), Taipei University (Taipei, 2019), and Peking University (Beijing, 2025), respectively. Additionally, the society also hosted two virtual conferences in 2021 and 2023.

The Seventh Biennial Conference will be held in Wuhan, China on June 18-19, 2027. As with previous conferences, we welcome submissions on any aspect of Chinese legal history from any period.

We especially encourage submissions that highlight this year's theme, “Chinese Law in Motion: Change, Practice, Circulation, and Continuity.” Law is never static. Across different historical periods and political regimes, Chinese law has evolved through processes of reform, adaptation, transmission, and contestation. Legal institutions, ideas, texts, and practices have moved across jurisdictions, social groups, and geographic spaces, while also preserving and reconfiguring enduring traditions and norms. This theme encourages inquiry into the ways Chinese law has changed, circulated, and persisted across diverse historical and social contexts. We interpret Chinese law and its culture broadly, encompassing legal systems and practices in traditional China proper, those of peripheral regions, and those pertaining to Chinese communities beyond national borders. Works that approach law comparatively or from a transnational perspective are especially welcome. So are works that invite theoretical and methodological discussion.

Conference format and submission guidelines.  This conference is held in person; virtual participation is not accommodated in principle. 

We encourage the submission of proposals for organized panels, with 3-4 papers in dialogue with each other under a general topic. You are also welcome to submit individual paper proposals, which, if selected, will be grouped together with other papers into panels. The proposal and the presentation can be in either English or Chinese. 

Please use the ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference Submission System to submit panel or individual paper proposals. 

You will need the following information to complete the submission. [For a] panel proposal:

• panel title and abstract (300 words maximum); 
• organizer and all presenters' name, email, WeChat (if available), position and affiliation, type of travel document, whether they apply for the Travel Grant, paper title and abstract (300 words maximum); 
• chair/discussant information (you can leave it blank if the chair/discussant hasn't been finalized yet) 

[For an] individual paper proposal:

• presenter's name, email, WeChat (if available), position and affiliation, type of travel document, whether you apply for the Travel Grant, paper title and abstract (300 words maximum) 

Important Dates.  Abstract submission deadline: August 31, 2026.  Notification of Acceptance: October 15, 2026

Registration, Logistics, and Travel Grant.  The conference registration fee will be waived for active ISCLH members. Accepted presenters must either demonstrate that they have active membership during the conference dates by April 1, 2027, or pay a one-time conference registration fee.

Participants are responsible for their own transportation and lodging. The co-organizer of the conference will help make reservations for 2 or 3 nights of hotel rooms for accepted participants at the participants’ cost. Participants are also welcome to make their own hotel arrangements according to their preferences.  Meals during the conference period will be provided by the co-organizer. 

We will provide a limited number of travel grants, available for graduate students and early career scholars who are ISCLH members and are presenting at the conference, to offset part of the travel costs. Priorities will be given to those who travel internationally or a long distance to Wuhan for the conference.

Contact.  Please direct any inquiries about the ISCLH 2027 Biennial Conference to isclh2027@gmail.com.

Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective

 [We have the following announcement.  DRE]

On June 24, 2026 (at 12pm Eastern), join us for an international workshop featuring contributors to a forthcoming Modern Criminal Law Review Special Issue on “Ancient Criminal Law: A Global Perspective,” guest edited by Clifford Ando (University of Chicago).

Recent years have witnessed several revolutions in the study of ancient law. These include new models for the study of ancient states, deriving in particular from comparative study; new interpretive emphasis on the limits of state infrastructural power; detailed study of the pluralist nature of legal authority in ancient empires in particular; and the extraordinary recovery of previously unknown documentary materials, especially in central Asian and East Asian contexts. This issue seeks to bring these new insights to bear on the study of criminal law in a global array of contexts:  the Ancient Near East, classical Athens, Qin and Han period China, the high Roman empire, and rabbinic Judaism.

Participants include: 

Clifford Ando, University of Chicago (moderator)
Beth Berkowitz, Columbia University
Ari Bryen, Vanderbilt University
Liang Cai, University of Notre Dame
Benjamin Gallant, Harvard University
Adriaan Lanni, Harvard University
Mark Letteney, University of Washington
Seth Richardson, University of Chicago
Andrew Wolpert, University of Florida

To join us for this free online event, please register here. Registration is encouraged, but not required; if you prefer to join the event directly, head over to the MCLR+ YouTube channel at the time of the event (please note the time zone). All attendees will have the opportunity to post questions and comments via YouTube live chat.

Weekend Roundup

• Alison LaCroix on using history to advise the University of Chicago's graduating class (Chicago Maroon).

•  A notice of "Law and the Paranormal: A Critical Perspective on Legal Rationality," a doctoral thesis submitted to Gonville and Caius College at Cambridge by Andrew Michael Sagar, in 2023, "traces how English law transformed its treatment of witchcraft, astrology, spiritual mediumship, and fortune-telling from crimes of supernatural harm into issues of fraud, commerce, and consumer regulation" (USAHerald). 

• An appreciation of Tay-sheng Wang's Introduction to Taiwan’s Legal History by Shih-An Wang, Project Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Law, Kobe University (Taiwan Insight).

• New in Gale's "Making of Modern Law" series, British Colonial Law: Acts, Ordinances, and Proclamations from the Colonies, 1643–1900. 

• The webinar "Making the Founding Documents Relevant in the 21st Century" will take place on Tuesday, June 2, 2026, commencing 1:30 PM (ET).  The panelists will be Paul Carrese, Arizona State University (moderator); Roosevelt Montás, Bard College; Jeremy Bailey, University of Florida; and Jocelyn Evans, University of West Florida.  Register here (PSNow). 

• 
  SHEAR's "Civics Exchange" "connects you with members of the Society for Historians of the Early Republic (SHEAR) who can speak to your organization, club, or institution about the history that has shaped our civic institutions and civic culture, and the relationship of the past to our present-day civic institutions and civic life."

• From In These Times: "Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Tony Mazzocchi, a Working-Class Hero" (and a major figure in 20th c. legal history). 

• An event of interest, on June 6: historian and archivist Daniel F. Gosling (UK National Archives) is offering an online intro to early modern legal records. (more)  

• Lawbook Exchange's May 2026 list of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: The history of Supreme Court leaks (SCOTUSblog).  What Jefferson and Madison would have thought about "rededicating" the US to God (The Conversation).  Hunting, Poaching, and the American Revolution (New York Almanack).

 Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers. 

AHA John K. Fairbank Prize to Sommer

Among the prizes and awards announced at the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History ("offered annually for an outstanding book in the history of China proper, Vietnam, Chinese Central Asia, Mongolia, Manchuria, Korea, or Japan, substantially after 1800"). This year's award went to legal historian Matthew H. Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia Univ. Press, 2024). The citation:

Matthew H. Sommer’s The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China is a landmark study that recovers the hidden lives of gender-nonconforming individuals through meticulous archival research. By combining legal, medical, and literary sources with a nuanced transgender framework, Sommer broadens the field of modern East Asian history, illuminating how embodiment, identity, and social practice shaped Qing society and redefining global conversations about gender and modernity.

Congratulations to Professor Sommer!

-- Karen Tani 

ASLH Surrency Prize to Han & Xiangyi

Continuing with our notices of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, we turn now to the Surrency Prize. About this prize: 

The Surrency Prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the Society’s journal, the Law and History Review, in the previous year. The prize is named in honor of Erwin C. Surrency, a founding member and first president of the Society and for many years the editor of its former publication, the American Journal of Legal History. 

The 2025 Surrency Prize winners were Shumeng Han (University of California, San Diego) and Ren Xiangyi (University of Chicago) for their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Law and History Review 42:2 (2024): 319–42. The citation:

In their article “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949,” Shumeng Han and Xiangyi Ren bring analytical clarity to a complex process of legal change. Through a sensitive and systematic reading of four decades of intergenerational property dispute cases in Jiangjin county, China, the authors illuminate a transformation of the fundamental Qing legal principle of filial piety. What began as a unified concept harmonizing individual filiality and morality with imperial loyalty and legitimacy, the authors explain, branched over time into multiple hybrid forms in Republican China. The article demonstrates how dual processes—changing legal rules and institutional nation-state building—coproduced forces within and without law that spun filial piety into different successor strands: individualist, nationalist, legal, and sentimental, each carrying forward a fragment of the original principle of filial piety. With precision, the article documents a Qing-Republican legal transition that is not a simple transplantation story of one order replacing another. Rather, as the authors conclude, “legal actors recreated and particularized the inherited conception [of filial piety] in their legal practice by drawing on sources from code, customs, and their specific historical context,” thus making and using diverse and even contradictory new strands. With this remarkable work of research and interpretation, “Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality” shows how the meaning of legal concepts may be transformed amid wider societal and regime change—and how to study such transformation with nuance, rigor and imagination.

An Honorable Mention went to Kate Alba Reeve (Columbia University) for “Between Empire and State: Haudenosaunee Sovereignty at the League of Nations,” Law and History Review 42:3 (2024): 499–520.

Congratulations to all!

-- Karen Tani  

 

ASLH Peter Gonville Stein Book Award to Sommer for "The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China"

We are delighted to pass along news of the awards, prizes, and fellowships announced at the recent meeting of the American Society for Legal History, starting with the Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. 

About the award: "The Peter Gonville Stein Book Award is awarded annually for the best book in non-US legal history written in English. This award is designed to recognize and encourage the further growth of fine work in legal history that focuses on all regions outside the United States, as well as global and international history. To be eligible, a book must be published during the previous calendar year." 

This year's award went to Matthew Sommer (Stanford University) for The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia University Press, 2024). The citation:

Looking back at a lifelong engagement with Chinese legal history in the Ming and Qing dynasties, with a special focus on gender and sexuality, Matthew Sommer breaks new ground in his most recent book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2024), uncovering several cases with transpeople who have been hiding in plain sight in the source material. The core of the book is based on routine and palace memorials from the First Historical Archives in Beijing, but Sommer also supplements his deep source base with popular tales about “the strange,” treaty port journals and newspapers, case books, legal codes, and compendia of traditional Chinese medicine. In contrast to his previous two books, which theorized about gender and sexuality based on thousands of legal cases, this book presents a concise series of case studies that identify what Sommer calls “transgender paradigms” in Chinese legal and social history. Among the figures that appear in these microhistories, we encounter a diverse set of gender non-conforming individuals, including eccentric midwives, cross-dressing clergy, unconventional physicians, and fox spirit mediums. One of the most interesting findings of the book is that while magistrates who prosecuted cases against trans people tended to rely on legal provisions banning heterodoxy, they were often confronted with the fact that there were no appropriate statutes that could prosecute cases involving trans people. Instead, they had to resort to interpretations of law that reveal interesting assumptions about gender, the body, law, procreation, and the fear of the unknown. This compelling and generative book is both a deep dive into complex and dense sources as well as a refreshing intervention into several subfields of legal history.

Honorable Mentions went to: Lauren Benton (Yale University) for The Called it Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence (Princeton University Press, 2024) and to Samuel Fury Childs Daly (University of Chicago) for Soldier’s Paradise: Militarism in Africa after Empire (Duke University Press, 2024).

Congratulations to all the honorees! 

-- Karen Tani  

Luo on Usury Law in Early Modern China

Weiwei Luo, Grinnell College, has published Beyond State/Market: Usury Law in Late-Ming China in Law and History Review:

This article examines the interdependent relationship between the state, law, and market in early modern China. Focusing on usury statutes, it analyzes how the Chinese state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries employed its legal framework to regulate a burgeoning money economy. The study underscores the critical role of law as an instrument of statecraft, essential for sustaining market functionality and social stability. Law’s multifaceted nature—encompassing legislation, specialist interpretations, adjudication, legal education, professional manuals, and popular knowledge—challenges the simplistic view of Confucian values as inherently anti-commerce. Instead, it shows how these values supported the uniformity and practicality of legal interpretations and judicial decisions. Moreover, the Chinese case points to a broader analytical framework with cross-cultural relevance: economic justice and market efficiency are not inherently opposed but can be mutually reinforcing when grounded in a shared set of values and legal regulations.

--Dan Ernst 

Weekend Roundup

•  A Q&A with Jane Manners, who joined Fordham's law faculty this fall (Fordham Law News).

• The death of former Vice President Dick Cheney has prompted reflections on his significance for U.S. legal history, including this one at the Conversation and this one at the New York Times. 

• Marlene Trestman has updated her database of 817 women who have argued before the U.S. Supreme Court (through May 15, 2025).  It is now live on the Supreme Court Historical Society's website.

• The Law & Economics Center at the George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School will host the symposium, The Un-Forgotten Founder: A Celebration of George Mason's Legacy on the Occasion of His 300th Birthday, on December 8, 2025.  The panelists include Akhil Reed Amar, Yale Law School; Michael S. Greve, George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School; The Honorable Edith Hollan Jones, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; and The Honorable William C. Mims, Senior Justice, Supreme Court of Virginia.

• Mitchell Del Bianco, who graduated this year from UVA Law's famed JD-MA program, has won the Morris L. Cohen Student Essay Competition for his paper, “What Is a House? An Exhibit Investigating Common Law Origins of the Open Fields Doctrine.” He wrote it for Professor Paul Halliday’s legal history class. (UVA Law).    

• Speaking of UVA Law, new courses taught in the January term and Spring 2026 semester include "Citizenship: The Law, History and Politics of U.S. Citizenship," co-taught by Karsh fellow Anja Bossow and Professor Amanda Frost; "Constitutional Law and Jurisprudence," co-taught by Charles Barzun and David Plunkett, visiting from Dartmouth's philosophy department; and "Roman Law of Family, Property and Succession," taught by Michael Doran.

• Cultural Critique Online has published a roundtable on The Autocratic Academy: Reenvisioning Rule within America's Universities (Duke University Press, 2023), by Timothy Kaufman-Osborn (Whitman College). It features responses by Joshua Barkan (Georgia), Michael Banerjee (UC Berkeley), and Adam Sitze (Amherst), along with a reply by Kaufman-Osborn.  

• Julian Zelizer interviews John Fabian Witt on his book The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.

• 
  Miloš Vec, University of Vienna, will deliver the lecture After 1919 and after 1945: How Two World Wars Shaped German Thinking on International Law, at Slovenia’s University of Ljubljana on November 14, 2025, at 3:00 pm.  More.  

• If you don't know who Sam Thorne was, consult this, which, for reasons known only to the algorithm, found its way to us this week.

• Lawbook Exchange's November catalogue of Scholarly Law and Legal History. 

• ICYMI: More Lepore (Harvard Crimson). Kenya's new judiciary museum (Eastleigh Voice).  An essay on Abortion, the 1966 book by the journalist Larry Nadler and the birth of the reproductive rights movement (Public Books).  The history of China's legal exam (World of Chinese).

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Keller on China, Legal Transplants, and Policy Irritants

Kevin Byrne Keller, a Visiting Fellow in East Asian Legal Studies at Harvard Law and PhD candidate in history at Yale, has published From Legal Transplants to Policy Irritants: Chinese Economic Expansion and Global Legal Change in the American Journal of Comparative Law:

Since the 1970s, comparative law scholars have studied “legal transplants”: legal institutions that emerged in one location and then were moved to (or forced upon) another. This research agenda offers little traction on one of today’s most pressing questions of global legal change. For several decades, Chinese leaders have encouraged Chinese enterprises to increase their international engagement. Those leaders insist that they have no desire to alter the legal systems of their economic partners, but China’s growing global economic presence does seem to affect legal systems elsewhere.

To make sense of this pattern, this Article draws on and extends Gunther Teubner’s concept of a “legal irritant.” It introduces the idea of a “policy irritant”: a policy that a country implements, inspired by policies elsewhere, that places pressure on and potentially reshapes the country’s legal regime. To demonstrate how the concept of a policy irritant improves our understanding of theoretical questions about legal change and concrete questions about current global conflicts, this Article offers a case study of the Madaraka Express, a China-funded railroad project in Kenya.

From a theoretical perspective, the Article makes two contributions to the literature on legal transplants. First, it reveals that policy emulation can catalyze legal change. Second, it observes that policy emulation can result in changes both to the recipient legal system and to the policy being emulated. At a more concrete level, the Article offers two insights into China’s engagement with the Global South. First, the introduction of China-inspired policies caused controversy in Kenya not because those policies were inherently insidious, but because they rubbed roughly against features of Kenya’s legal system that many Kenyans value highly. Second, Kenya’s legal system has shown strength in the face of pressures introduced by China-inspired policies, and has in some instances forced changes in those policies.

--Dan Ernst

Kroncke on American Legal Education and Chinese Law Reform

Jedidiah J. Kroncke, University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, has posted Model, System, or Node? Understanding Legal Education Reform in Twentieth-century China and Beyond:

This chapter examines the complex influence and impact of American legal education models in China's 20th-century legal reforms. It argues that while American legal ideas were widely discussed and promoted, their actual influence on China's legal education system was limited. A conceptual framework is introduced which distinguishes between a country's system of legal education, its ideal model of a law school, and episodic nodes for integrating elite domestic and international legal capital. The analysis reveals that American legal education, particularly the "Harvard model," was often presented as an ideal for reform in China. However, it primarily functioned as a model for elite, non-replicable nodes. Ultimately, this chapter challenges claims of significant American influence. It also highlights the importance of understanding the contested nature of legal education reform within China's specific historical and political context.

--Dan Ernst 

Brill's Law and Society in China Book Series

[Via H-Law, we have the following announcement.  DRE]

Call for Manuscripts:  Law and Society in China Book Series/Brill

After nearly four decades of reform, China is a transformed and yet a rapidly changing society. Along with the continuing economic changes, there is no dispute that China has witnessed tremendous transformations in the area of law.

This series aims to study the legal development in China from the historical and comparative perspectives. It seeks to bring together scholarly work that not only examines legal theories but also investigates how law is implemented and enforced in the Chinese society. It aims to become the series of choice for prospective authors of in-depth historical, theoretical studies as well as socio-legal and empirical studies on Chinese law.

We invite scholars from all disciplines working on Chinese law and society to submit book proposals or full manuscripts. Submissions should engage critically with legal developments in China and contribute to a deeper understanding of its evolving legal landscape.

Submissions and Inquiries: All submissions will undergo a double-anonymous peer review prior to acceptance.  Please direct your proposals or completed manuscripts to the Acquisitions Editor at Brill, Iulia Ivana (iulia.ivana@degruyterbrill.com).

For more information, please visit the series' webpage.  We look forward to your contributions to this important and growing field.

Iulia Ivana (iulia.ivana@degruyterbrill.com)
Acquisitions Editor, Asian Studies, Brill

Cai on Tort Law in Early Imperial China

Liang Cai has published open access in Law and History Review Absence of Talion and Tort Law in Early Imperial China (221BCE-9 CE): How Body Politic Cancelled Corrective Justice:

From a comparative perspective, this paper argues that early Chinese empires lacked the concept of talion or tort law when malicious violence or intent became factors. Instead, wrongdoers were required to pay fines to the government or received punishment as hard labor for the state. Victims not only could not receive compensation but were sometimes punished along with the offender if their loss was perceived as a loss to the empire. I argue that the absence of corrective justice in criminal cases can be traced back to the philosophical underpinnings of the body politic, a prominent discourse in early China that viewed the emperor and the people as a single, organic entity. When people were conceived of as constituting a unified, singular entity, criminal actions against an individual were interpreted as damage to the empire. Therefore, punishments for offenders were designed to compensate the empire, not the individual. Furthermore, in the context of the body politic, the suffering of both victims and offenders was regarded as metaphysically equal, which justified frequently pardoning culprits on a large scale to secure harmony within the empire. Originally, the body politic was employed to admonish and criticize the throne, urging the emperor to align his interests with the well-being of his people, but in practice, it compromised the practice of justice.

--Dan Ernst

Ruskola on the Making of the Chinese Working Class

Teemu Ruskola, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has posted The Making of The Chinese Working Class, which is forthcoming in the New Left Review.

This essay, forthcoming in the New Left Review, is an advance excerpt from a book entitled The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: The Global Limits of Capitalism, to be published by Verso Books in 2026. The title of the essay is a deliberate nod to E.P. Thompson’s classic The Making of the English Working Class. The English working class constituted the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West. It provides an ideal lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage.

Thompson framed his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, which expropriated peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labor. In China, too, there is occurring a similar dispossession of peasantry that is sometimes described as a New Enclosure Movement. However, the two enclosure movements differ notably in their temporal and spatial scope.  First, processes that took place over a period of several centuries in England are being telescoped into just three decades in China.  Second, they are taking place in the opposite order:  the initial commodification of industrial labor in the 1990s was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant laborers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land.  Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily, i.e., under economic duress without the need to resort to forcible dislocation?  This essay, and the book of which it is a part, address this question by focusing on distinctive forms of ownership of rural and urban land in China—a legal distinction that has no precedent in Chinese history, Marxian thought, or Soviet praxis.

--Dan Ernst

Jia on Constitutional Education in China and the US

My Georgetown Law colleague Mark Jia has posted The Possibilities of Constitutional Education:

Constitutional scholarship has traditionally focused on formal constitutional actors: courts, legislatures, and executives. These actors are often regarded as primary sources of constitutional law, or in some cases, as final arbiters of constitutional meaning. More peripheral in this literature are actors thought to transmit what courts and high officials have established. These constitutional educators, including law professors, legal journalists, and civics planners, are often overlooked for defensible reasons: they lack the normative authorities of formal institutional actors, and they do not exercise power as it is often understood in public law.

This Article advances a general theory of constitutional education to show what is possible through centering the output of constitutional educators. In an age of global constitutional change and local constitutional upheaval, constitutional education can shed light on basic questions of constitutional order. The analytic value of constitutional education lies not in studying it in isolation, but from examining how primary constitutional research subjects—texts, ideas, methods, decisions, and reasons—are refracted through a distinct set of downstream epistemic actors. Focusing on two case studies, the United States and China, the Article shows how the study of constitutional education can illuminate the functions of authoritarian constitutions, the construction of constitutional culture, and the dynamics of constitutional change. In so arguing, the Article also suggests that certain constitutional patterns may transcend divisions between autocracy and democracy, constitutions and constitutionalism.

--Dan Ernst

Ruskola on Montesquieu and "Oriental Despotism"

Teemu Ruskola, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has posted Oriental Despotism Inside Out: On the Global Travels of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois:

Baron de Montesquieu (NYPL)

This speculative essay analyzes Montesquieu’s comparative method in his De l’esprit des lois (1748) and its contemporary legacies. It takes as its focus his theory of Oriental despotism. The first half of the paper focuses on two aspects of his method. First, Montesquieu’s empirical approach to political theory marks him apart from his humanist predecessors. Turning away from natural law and a search for universal principles, he instead attends to nature itself in order to understand the diversity of social and legal phenomena. Second, I comment briefly on Montesquieu’s reworking of Europe’s metageographic status. I analyze him as a key figure in replacing an essentially religious distinction between the Christian world and a heathen Orient with a more plural world divided into continents marked by cultural and political differences.

In the second half of the paper I turn to Montesquieu’s use of China as a paradigmatic instance of “Oriental despotism.” Paradoxically, Montesquieu develops his idea of despotism as a critique of French absolutism while projecting its prototype into the Orient, China in particular. In the final analysis, however, Montesquieu himself is forced to admit that in several key respects China does not fit the category it supposedly exemplifies. Yet despite its flawed empirical foundation, over time Oriental despotism mutates from a theory of politics into a theory of scientific racism with global implications. I conclude by examining the geopolitical implications of Montesquieu’s analysis with respect to the discourse of Chinese authoritarianism today.

--Dan Ernst

LHR 42:2

Law and History Review 42:2 (May 2024) is now available online:

Legal Pluralism as a Category of Analysis
Jessica Marglin, Mark Letteney

Legal Pluralism's Other: Mythologizing Modern Law
Caroline Humfress

Legal Pluralism from History to Theory and Back: Otto von Gierke, Santi Romano, and Francesco Calasso on Medieval Institutions
Emanuele Conte

The Rise of the Indigenous Jurists
Clifford Ando

Interpolity Law and Jurisdictional Politics
Lauren Benton, Adam Clulow

The Uses and Abuses of Legal Pluralism: A View from the Sideline
Tamar Herzog

Rethinking the Rethinking of Legal Pluralism: Toward a Manifesto for a Pluri-Legal Perspective
Ido Shahar, Karin Carmit Yefet

The Edicts of the Praetors: Law, Time, and Revolution in Ancient Rome
Lisa Pilar Eberle

The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787
    Timothy Messer-Kruse

Free Black Witnesses in the Antebellum Upper South
Eric Eisner

Disobedient Children, Hybrid Filiality: Negotiating Parent–Child Relations in Local Legal System in Republican China, 1911–1949
Shumeng Han, Xiangyi Ren

Human Rights at the Edges of Late Imperial Britain: The Tyrer Case and Judicial Corporal Punishment from the Isle of Man to Montserrat, 1972–1990
Christopher Hilliard, Marco Duranti

An Instrument of Military Power: The Development and Evolution of Japanese Martial Law in Occupied Territories, 1894–1945
Kelly Maddox

“Above the Written Law”: Iran-Contra and the Mirage of the Rule of Law
Alan McPherson

--Dan Ernst

Ruskola on Liberalism, Authoritarianism, and China

Teemu Ruskola, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, has posted The Limits of Liberal Justice: On Authoritarianism and Instrumental Theories of Law, which is forthcoming in the Asia Pacific Law Review:

Baron de Montesquieu (NYPL)

In this essay, I use Professor Sucheng Wang's recent book Law as an Instrument: Sources of Chinese Law for Authoritarian Legality as a point of departure for reconsidering the conventional opposition between liberal and authoritarian forms of legality. I suggest that opposition is in turn embedded in an even more elemental distinction between different state forms. Turning to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, I first investigate the historical and geopolitical processes by which modern political theory reduced the political universe into three species of states (republics, monarchies, and despotisms) and then merely two (democracies and authoritarian states). I then turn to the contemporary genealogy of the concept of rule of law, which arose first as a critique of the rise of the administrative state in the West and then became a means to delegitimize socialist conceptions of legality. I conclude by focusing on the People's Republic of China to evaluate the utility of assessing its legal order in terms of authoritarian legality as well as in terms of democracy more generally.

--Dan Ernst

Kroncke on the Lost Era of US-China Constitutional Engagement

On March 29, 2024, from 12:20 pm - 1:20 pm, Jedidiah Kroncke, Associate Professor of Law, University of Hong Kong, will present the paper Thomas Jefferson, Carsun Chang and A Lost Era of U.S.-China Constitutional Engagement in 308 Morgan Meeting Room of Austin Hall, at the Harvard Law School.

Professor Kroncke’s study recovers a lost era of Sino-American constitutional imagination surrounding the drafting of the 1946 Republic of China Constitution. It examines the transnational dynamics that led the Constitution’s initial drafter, Carsun Chang, to travel to the U.S. in 1945 to ostensibly study the ideas of Thomas Jefferson then ascendant in New Deal constitutional rhetoric.

This study recontextualizes Chang’s life as one of China’s new generation of cosmopolitan intellectuals moving between its contentious post-dynastic politics and the institutions of the post-World War II international legal order. Chang’s invitation by the Roosevelt Administration involved many little known but determinative turns, including the role of a subset of Truman Administration officials actively enamored with Jefferson’s own study of Confucianism.

Transnationalizing our understanding of the 1946 Constitution helps reveal how the geopolitics of the Chinese Civil War intersected with the presumed projection of American constitutional values increasingly embedded in American internationalism. The fallout from the drafting process also illuminates the transition of America from a global symbol of constitutional revolution to a symbol of global racial empire. Recapturing this era has implications for originalist-styled constitutional arguments made in contemporary Taiwan, as well as evaluating the international dimensions of Jefferson’s deeply problematic domestic legacy.

A boxed lunch will be provided.  East Asian Legal Studies is sponsoring the event.

--Dan Ernst

Brown, "Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China"

Princeton University Press has published Laws of the Land: Fengshui and the State in Qing Dynasty China (2023), by Tristan G. Brown (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). A description from the praise:

Today the term fengshui, which literally means “wind and water,” is recognized around the world. Yet few know exactly what it means, let alone its fascinating history. In Laws of the Land, Tristan Brown tells the story of the important roles—especially legal ones—played by fengshui in Chinese society during China’s last imperial dynasty, the Manchu Qing (1644–1912).

Employing archives from Mainland China and Taiwan that have only recently become available, this is the first book to document fengshui’s invocations in Chinese law during the Qing dynasty. Facing a growing population, dwindling natural resources, and an overburdened rural government, judicial administrators across China grappled with disputes and petitions about fengshui in their efforts to sustain forestry, farming, mining, and city planning. Laws of the Land offers a radically new interpretation of these legal arrangements: they worked. An intelligent, considered, and sustained engagement with fengshui on the ground helped the imperial state keep the peace and maintain its legitimacy, especially during the increasingly turbulent decades of the nineteenth century. As the century came to an end, contentious debates over industrialization swept across the bureaucracy, with fengshui invoked by officials and scholars opposed to the establishment of railways, telegraphs, and foreign-owned mines.

Demonstrating that the only way to understand those debates and their profound stakes is to grasp fengshui’s longstanding roles in Chinese public life, Laws of the Land rethinks key issues in the history of Chinese law, politics, science, religion, and economics.

A sample of advance praise:

“Brown offers an impressive, fine-combed reading of sources that paint a vivid picture of fengshui’s signature importance within local life and Qing law. A terrific contribution to Chinese history.”—Jonathan Schlesinger

“A rare look into the intersection of state power and cosmic power in Qing China, Laws of the Land demonstrates how this intersection was intentional and vital to the survival of the empire. Breaking from the Orientalist and imperialist denigrations of fengshui as a superstition, this meticulously researched book argues that the persistence of fengshui resulted from its mutual constitution with Qing law itself.” -- He Brian

More information is available here. An interview with the author is available here, at New Books Network.

-- Karen Tani