The Chinese Legal Tradition: From Late Empire to the Current Day

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory hosts the first conference of a new working group dedicated to exploring the history of a distinctly Chinese legal tradition linking the imperial past to the legal regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Assertions about the distinct qualities of Chinese law can be found in all manner of claims: both those supporting China's legal tradition as distinct from Western legal regimes (and therefore immune from certain forms of critique) and those denying or critiquing the legitimacy of law in China. This is as true for the global reception of Chinese law in the late imperial period as it is for scholars and observers of the PRC's administration of justice in the current day.

But in spite of the ever-present nature of the claim that the Chinese legal tradition is essentially distinct from those of Europe and the US, assertions about the exact content of the Chinese legal tradition and the precise institutions that define its evolution vary wildly from characterization to characterization (when they are specified at all). This conference and the working group that emerge from it will serve as a platform for scholars of Chinese law in different eras to propose and evaluate which institutions, features, trajectories of development, patterns, and themes might fruitfully describe a Chinese legal tradition and its evolution.

This is an internal workshop limited to admitted participants only.

Please find further information on the related research project here.