Colonialism Without Colonies: On the Extraterritorial Jurisprudence of the U.S. Court for China

The US Court for China was created by Congress in 1906, and it was not abolished until 1943. The Shanghai-based court had extraterritorial jurisdiction over all American citizens within its district, known as the District of China for jurisdictional purposes. The court is fascinating in its own right, and it produced what one observer has described as a system of jurisdiction that was more complete than that of any body extraterritorial law. Here, Ruskola elaborates the court\u27s jurisprudence. He focuses on some of the conflicts-of-law problems the court had to face. Also, he describes the law applied by the court, which consisted of a melange of colonial common law as it existed prior to American independence, general congressional acts, the municipal code of the District of Columbia, and the code of the Territory of Alaska

A Reader’s Guide to \u3ci\u3eLegal Orientalism\u3c/i\u3e

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 self-Orientalism, Oriental legalism, and the comparative method

Legal Orientalism

Fifty years ago comparative law was a field in search of a paradigm. In the inaugural issue of the American Journal of Comparative Law in 1952, Myres McDougal remarked unhappily, The greatest confusion continues to prevail about what is being compared, about the purposes of comparison, and about appropriate techniques. In short, there seemed to be very little in the field that was not in a state of confusion. Two decades later, referring to McDougal\u27s bleak assessment, John Merryman saw no evidence of progress: few comparative lawyers would suggest that matters have since improved. And only a few years ago, John Langbein suggested that comparative law remains in dire straits: If the study of comparative law were to be banned from American law schools tomorrow morning, hardly anyone would notice. A certain amount of hand-wringing is thus de rigueur in any piece of comparative law scholarship that wants to be viewed as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. At the risk of perpetuating the notion that comparative lawyers suffer from a Cinderella complex, I too begin with the obligatory observation that comparative law remains a relatively underappreciated field in the legal academy. My main purpose, however, is to join other recent voices seeking to invigorate the field by proposing new avenues of inquiry

What Is a Corporation? Liberal, Confucion, and Socialist Theories of Enterprise Organization (and State, Family, and Personhood)

What is a corporation? An easy, but not very informative, answer is that it is a legal person. More substantive answers suggest it is a moral person, a person/thing, a production team, a nexus of private agreements, a city, a semi-sovereign, or a (secular) God. Despite the economic, political, and social importance of the corporate form, we do not have a generally accepted legal theory of what a corporation is, apart from the law’s questionable assertion that it is a “person.” In this Article, the author places the idea, and law, of the corporation in a comparative context and suggests that corporation law is a “theme from the borderland where ethical speculation marches with jurisprudence.” The Article further outlines theories of enterprise organization as liberal, Confucian, and Chinese state socialist. The Article then analyzes some of the ways in which each theory of enterprise organization resorts to distinctive ideological fictions to maintain their internal coherence, before considering the practical implications of this analysis in the context of the reform of Chinese state-owned enterprises

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

While there is already much excellent work in the genre of Chinese Law and Literature, Haiyan Lee’s A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (University of Chicago Press 2023) sets a new standard for the field. This is a review Lee’s smart and ambitious book, which far exceeds the bounds of both law and literature, expanding into adjacent fields of legal and literary humanities: history, political theory, moral philosophy, and cognitive psychology, to name just some of the many literatures on which Lee draws. A Certain Justice is filled with exciting local and global insights, some of which are dazzling

Excerpt from Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law

Excerpted from Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013)