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A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

Online ISBN:
9780226825267
Print ISBN:
9780226825243
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

Haiyan Lee
Haiyan Lee
Stanford University
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Published online:
18 January 2024
Published in print:
5 June 2023
Online ISBN:
9780226825267
Print ISBN:
9780226825243
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window-dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. The rule of law seems an elusive ideal in the face of entrenched obstacles, baked, as it were, into China’s cultural and political DNA. This highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities contends that this impression of China arises from an ahistorical understanding of China’s political-legal culture, particularly the failure to distinguish between the notions of high justice and low justice. Justice, the book shows, is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. The book uses high and low justice as the organizing concepts to make sense of a political-legal culture that is marked by a mistrust of law’s ability to deliver justice and a privileging of substantive over procedural justice. The book illustrates the hierarchy of high and low justice with an array of justice narratives, from spy thrillers that enchant the state to tales of not playing fair, from trials of war criminals to mice suing cats in underworld courts. By bringing stories about crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemption from a non-liberal tradition into conversation with Western moral, political, and legal philosophy, the book helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and in terms other than those furnished by the rule of law.

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