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Bird In A Cage: Chinese Law Reform After Twenty Years, Stanley Lubman

Stanley Lubman

When I wrote in 1979, it was easy to summarize the state of Chinese legal institutions because they were so sparse. Although a judicial system had been created on the Soviet model in the 1950s, it had been politicized by the end of that decade after a brief period of liberalization, and then further wrecked by the Cultural Revolution. A new period of institution-building began in 1979; reconstruction of the courts began and the law schools, closed for a decade, reopened. Most fundamentally, the policies of the Chinese leadership seemed to promise, as I noted then, "attempts to conceptualize and …