Pure, orthodox and incorruptible, Judge Bao has been serving as the preeminent embodiment of justice in China for almost a thousand years, so much so his court case have been adapted as stories, novels and plays over the centuries. Now, for the very first time a series of eight ballad-stories on Judge Bao, dating from the period 1250ndash;1450, are offered in a complete and annotated translation. These texts will provide the reader a complete reflection of the legend of Judge Bao in its earliest phase of development, with an extended introduction placing the ballad-stories in context with the development of the Judge Bao legend. These ballad-stories, in contrast to past plays dating from the same period, present abuse of power and corruption as endemic in the courts and bureaucratic service, and show Judge Bao imposing the rule of law even on the emperor.
Ch. 1. The tale of the early career of Rescriptor Bao -- ch. 2. Judge Bao selling rice in Chenzhou -- ch. 3. The tale of the humane ancestor recognizing his mother -- ch. 4. Dragon-design Bao sentences the white weretiger -- ch. 5. Rescriptor Bao decides the case of the weird black pot -- ch. 6. The tale of the case of dragon-design Bao sentencing the emperor's brothers-in-law Cao -- ch. 7. The tale of Zhang Wengui. Part one. The Tale of Zhang Wengui. Part two -- ch. 8. The story of how Shi Guanshou's wife Liu Dusai on the night of the fifteenth, on superior prime, watched the lanterns. Part one. The story of the judgment of dragon-design Bao in the case of Prince Zhao and Sun Wenyi. Part two.
Shawn Thacker is a trained assassin from the future who seeks revenge on the only other man with his affliction—each life they take forces them both to travel between vastly different past and future eras. Spanning from 22nd century Tokyo to 1950s New Orleans to the Cretaceous Era and beyond, the two mortal rivals are locked in a battle of wills that spans millions of years, all to alter the course of history.
China as an emerging world power is currently undergoing a tortuous process of reform in its legal system. China's difficulties are rooted in their worldview regarding justice and the supernatural. In contrast to the West, the Chinese do not regard divine powers as law-givers. In their view, since great antiquity laws have been created by human authorities for rulers to effectively control their subjects. This notion of rule by law is fundamentally different from the Western idea of rule of law based on protecting the rights of individual citizens. The Chinese emphasis on criminal justice is rooted in their conception of morality which is tied to their cosmology and supernatural beliefs. This book focuses on criminal justice by drawing upon court cases which appear in historical records. The author has included legendary stories, folk tales and wuxia (martial heroes or knights-errant) novels because they inform us in an interesting manner about the popular beliefs in justice and the supernatural, which guided the day-to-day action of the ordinary people. The author draws examples primarily from antiquity to the Song dynasty (960-1279) when these beliefs could very well be garnered from the rich sources of Zhe Yu Gui Jian (Exemplars in Judging Criminal Cases) containing 395 cases and Yi Jian Zhi (Accounts of Strange Happenings) containing 2,776 episodes, many of which involving the supernatural, as well as the captivating stories of the legendary Judge Bao who lived during the Song. This book concludes with a discussion of continuity and change down to the present in the context of a broad social and political landscape.
This review examines the literature on procedural justice and the fair trial over the past two decades in the People’s Republic of China. Part 1 gives a wide-angle view of the key political events and developments that have shaped the experience of procedural justice and the fair trial in contemporary China. It provides a storyline that explains the political environment in which these concepts have developed over time. Part 2 examines how scholars understand the legal structures of the criminal process in relation to China’s political culture. Part 3 presents scholarly views on three enduring problems relating to the fair trial: a presumption of innocence, interrogational torture, and the role of lawyers in the criminal trial process. Procedural justice is a particularly pertinent issue today in China, because Xi Jinping’s yifa zhiguo 依法治国 (governing the nation in accordance with the law) governance platform seeks to embed a greater appreciation for procedural justice in criminal justice decision-making, to correct a politico-legal tradition overwhelmingly focused on substantive justice. Overall, the literature reviewed in this article points to the serious limitations in overcoming the politico-legal barriers to justice reforms that remain intact in the system, despite nearly four decades of constant reform.
Dispute resolution reforms in China in the last decade or so have all centred around the strategy of establishing an integrated dispute resolution system as part of China’s modern governance system. This new integrated system, referred to as the ‘Mechanism for Pluralist Dispute Resolution (PDR)’ in China, serves as a dispute resolution system as well as a comprehensive social control mechanism. This book is the first academic attempt to explain the methods of civil and commercial dispute resolution in China from the perspective of PDR. It systematically and critically examines the development of China’s dispute resolution system, with each chapter analysing in detail the development and transformation of the different institutions, mechanisms and processes in their historical, politico-economic and comparative context.
This open access publication discusses exclusionary rules in different criminal justice systems. It is based on the findings of a research project in comparative law with a focus on the question of whether or not a fair trial can be secured through evidence exclusion. Part I explains the legal framework in which exclusionary rules function in six legal systems: Germany, Switzerland, People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, Singapore, and the United States. Part II is dedicated to selected issues identified as crucial for the assessment of exclusionary rules. These chapters highlight the delicate balance of interests required in the exclusion of potentially relevant information from a criminal trial and discusses possible approaches to alleviate the legal hurdles involved.
This is a full-length study of Chinese crime fiction in all eras: ancient, modern, and contemporary. It is also the first book to apply legal scholars law and literature inquiry to the rich field of Chinese legal and literary culture.
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.
This collection of articles and essays by Herbert Kritzer draws on his extensive research related to lawyers and legal practice conducted over the last 35 years. That research has applied existing theoretical frameworks and developed innovative ways of thinking about how to understand what it is that lawyers do. The chapters reflect the wide range of both qualitative and quantitative research methods he has employed, and draw on his work on the Civil Litigation Research Project, a massive study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice under the Carter administration, and continues through subsequent studies of lawyer-client relationships in Canada, contingency fee legal practice, and insurance defense practice. This book is for scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the work of lawyers in day-to-day litigation-like settings—and those concerned about what the future might hold for the structure of the legal profession and the nature of legal practice. “Lawyers at Work is a masterful collection, by one of the leading and award winning empirical researchers on legal institutions and the legal profession today, on the ‘black box’ of law practice. Spanning decades of research, Professor Kritzer presents data and findings on how lawyers bill, develop relationships with clients and opponents, manage scientific expertise, negotiate, and conduct their everyday work in a wide variety of case types. He explores and exposes the differences in both theories and data about the legal profession from virtually every major study there is on what lawyers actually do. If anyone wants to know about the real practices of lawyers in the past and present, and with important projections about the future, this is a must read. We can speculate about what lawyers really do, but Kritzer has the actual ‘facts.’” — Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Political Science, University of California, Irvine, and A.B. Chettle Professor of Law, Dispute Resolution and Civil Procedure, Georgetown University Law Center “Through wide-ranging field research over 35 years Kritzer has done more than anyone to document the craft of lawyers at work. This extraordinary compilation finds the whole in a professional lifetime of research, cementing Kritzer’s reputation as pioneer and master of empirical legal research.” — Tom Baker, William Maul Measey Professor of Law and Health Sciences, University of Pennsylvania Law School “Bert Kritzer has long been recognized as one of the most astute scholarly commentators on the U.S. legal profession. This collection of papers allows readers to see his body of work as a whole, and to appreciate the unique combination of quantitative and qualitative skills on which it rests. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to cut through the myths that pervade debates about policy and practice in civil justice.” — Robert Dingwall, Nottingham Trent University, UK
