Law Commons^™

Authoritarian Justice In China: Is There A Chinese Model?, Benjamin L. Liebman

Faculty Scholarship

Most recent Western popular and scholarly writing on legal reform in China has focused on two apparently contradictory trends. Since coming to power in 2012 China's new leadership has significantly curtailed the limits of permissible legal activism, highlighted most clearly by the detention and prosecution of numerous leading lawyers and academics. The Party-state has also increased oversight and control over legal education and has explicitly rejected the relevance of Western models of legality for China, including concepts such as judicial independence. At the same time, China's leadership has announced some of the most significant legal reforms in decades, in particular …