Awards

• Nominated for ASIL Certificates of Merit 2014
• Nominated for James Willard Hurst Prize 2014
• Nominated for John Phillip Reid Book Award 2014
• Nominated for Joseph Levenson Book Prize 2015

Overview

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world's chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law's universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of ""legal Orientalism"": a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its ""failure"" to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court's jurisdiction over the ""District of China."" With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

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9780674073067

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Reviews

This well-researched, thought-provoking book applies the analytical framework of Orientalism to the study of Chinese law. The book is much more than a study of the Chinese legal system. It provides a commentary on how an Orientalist interpretation denied the existence of law in China and provided the basis for the development of an American philosophy of empire that has influenced not only U.S. interactions with China but also America s relations with much of the non-European world The book is a welcome addition to the growing literature in comparative legal studies and is a must read not only for students of Chinese and U.S. law but also for those interested in the larger questions concerning relations between the West and the non-European world.--H. Shambayati Choice (03/01/2014)

Teemu Ruskola has written a work that stretches across time, place and legal jurisdiction; Legal Orientalism shows a scholarly mind for detail, combined with a rare degree of expansiveness and reach. A remarkable book.--Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths University Of London

This breakthrough book places the legal study of China's relationship to the West, and vice versa, on a new and deep foundation. It deserves serious attention from any thoughtful student of comparative law.--Bruce Ackerman, Yale University This well-researched, thought-provoking book applies the analytical framework of Orientalism to the study of Chinese law. The book is much more than a study of the Chinese legal system. It provides a commentary on how an Orientalist interpretation denied the existence of law in China and provided the basis for the development of an American philosophy of empire that has influenced not only U.S. interactions with China but also America's relations with much of the non-European world...The book is a welcome addition to the growing literature in comparative legal studies and is a must read not only for students of Chinese and U.S. law but also for those interested in the larger questions concerning relations between the West and the non-European world.-- (03/01/2014) Extraterritoriality was the exception until it became the norm--an anomaly of jurisdiction that set the precedent for other practices including extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, offshore prisons, and drone attacks. A history of conceptual makeshifts, illocutionary effects, and massive legal fictions, Legal Orientalism, painstakingly researched, humorous, and dispassionate, uniquely accounts for the ambiguous place of China in the institutions of modernity.--Haun Saussy, University of Chicago Ruskola has written a work that stretches across time, place and legal jurisdiction; Legal Orientalism shows a scholarly mind for detail, combined with a rare degree of expansiveness and reach. A remarkable book.--Michael Dutton, Goldsmiths University of London Teemu Ruskola has written a provocative book on legal orientalism, a subject that he conceptualizes and explores with originality and sophistication. His book makes an important contribution to multiple fields. On the one hand, it is a historical analysis that illuminates important aspects of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century world history. On the other, this book is urgently contemporary, speaking to interest in legal studies and the social sciences about the place of law and legal reform in present-day China.--Mae Ngai, Columbia University

Author Information

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University.

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