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A Reader’S Guide To Legal Orientalism, Teemu Ruskola
A Reader’S Guide To Legal Orientalism, Teemu Ruskola
All Faculty Scholarship
My book Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press 2013) was published in translation in China in 2016. This essay analyzes the Chinese reception of this book. Originally addressed to a North American readership, Legal Orientalism examines critically the asymmetric relationship in which Euro-American law and Chinese law stand to one another, the former regarding itself as an embodiment of universal values while viewing the latter’s as culturally particular ones. The essay explores what happens when a “Western” work of self-criticism is transmitted to an “Eastern” audience. In this context, it analyzes the politics of …
The Rule Of Law: China's Skepticism And The Rule Of People, Pat K. Chew
The Rule Of Law: China's Skepticism And The Rule Of People, Pat K. Chew
Articles
The West believes that without formal legal rules (the rule of law), how society operates is not transparent. This opaqueness in how things get done discourages trade, including foreign investment, which in turn makes overall economic development more difficult. Instead of predictable legal rules, the fear is that the void will be filled with unpredictable and arbitrary human indiscretions. Furthermore, the West believes that the absence of the rule of law makes the basic protection of human and civil rights problematic.
However, the Western view of the rule of law is not the only model. Alternative cultural assumptions about the …