From Weimar to China

Volume 28 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History out now

Volume 28 of the Global Perspectives on Legal History places social rights at the center of the Weimar Constitution’s long journey to China. It tells a global legal history of how jurists and legislators used constitutional language to conceptualize 20th-century projects of social transformation. Fupeng Li maps the routes by which German Staatsrechtslehre and the Weimar Constitution’s concept of social rights entered Chinese debates. In doing so, he offers a new framework for understanding how constitutions mediate social revolution through the cultural translation of rights into policies. At the core of the analysis lies a structural shift: from the Weimar Constitution’s rights-based model of social order to the policy-oriented constitutionalism that came to characterize modern China.

Fupeng Li is Associate Professor of Legal History at the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), Beijing. Since 2021, he has been an Affiliated Researcher at the mpilhlt. Since 2025, he has co-led, together with Thomas Duve, the Max Planck Partner Group at CUPL, “A Digital Global Legal History”.