Description

Since the end of the Cold War, 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, tracing back to the first Sino–U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China., creating a kind of legal imperialism causing enduring damage to legal Orientlalism to this day.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law at Emory University. His scholarship addresses questions of legal history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point. Most recently, he is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard, 2013).