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Categories And Culture: On The 'Rectification Of Names' In Comparative Law, Janet Ainsworth

Faculty Articles

This article proposes a thorough ‘rectification of names’ take place in comparative legal studies, with a specific focus on Chinese law. Pioneering Chinese comparative law scholars focused on describing the Chinese legal system using Western legal terminology. The job of the second-generation of legal scholars, however, is to interpret both the primary source material and prior interpretations. There are many pitfalls entailed with studying non-Western law, foremost is the danger of one’s conceptual paradigms influencing an interpretation. Any culture’s legal order is uniquely tuned to a cultural context, and Chinese culture represents a social order with sufficient coherence for scholars …