Meet the Author | Liang Zhiping: “Horizons of Legal History: Methods, Interests, and Paradigms”

About the Author:

Liang Zhiping is a renowned Chinese legal scholar and is considered the founder of Legal Cultural Theory in China. He received a Bachelor of Laws from Southwest College of Political Science and Law (西南政法学院) in 1982, and a Master of Laws from Renmin University of China (中国人民大学) in 1985. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Columbia University, and the University of Hong Kong. Since 2021, Liang has been Professor of Legal History, Legal Culture, and Law and Society at Zhejiang University (浙江大学) in Hangzhou. His wide-ranging research interests include issues of Chinese and comparative legal culture, legal history, and the field of law and society. Apart from his rich scholarship, he has also translated a large number of American legal works into Chinese.

About the Article:

“If history is the record of mankind’s past experiences, then legal history is that part of it which relates to the law.“ Liang Zhiping’s article “Horizons of Legal History: Methods, Interests, and Paradigms” (2002) offers fundamental reflections on the many processes by which legal history is constructed. Published nearly 25 years ago, Liang’s impressive panoramic view of the history of Chinese legal historiography until today forms a core contribution to the field unprecedented in contemporary scholarship. Studying Chinese legal history beyond the significance of historical materials, Liang emphasises how scholarship in the field was shaped by the interplay of methods, interests, and paradigms (“a set of unquestionable theories or beliefs that historians, either consciously or unconsciously, invoke as the basis for their work”). The author surveys major trajectories in modern Chinese legal-historical writing, even tracking how the paradigms within the field have been created across millennia, while also comparing the scholarly ecologies across mainland China, Taiwan, Japan, the US, and Hong Kong to show how institutions, source bases, and contemporary concerns generate distinct research styles. Critiquing the rather formulaic, textbook-driven models, Liang calls for a more self-reflexive legal history, one that is socially grounded, attentive to meaning and practice, and capable of using law to shine a light on culture as much as culture can be used to illuminate the law. As Chinese legal history is experiencing important transformations, foundational contributions such as Liang’s article become all the more significant, not least because the field itself participates in the broader construction of an independent Chinese knowledge system within legal studies.

Vincent Conway and Sandra Röseler have translated Liang Zhiping’s article into English and registered participants will be pre-circulated the translation.