Drawing on the insights of prior scholarship, Professor Chen’s speech will inquire an expansive legal community in late imperial China and further challenge the once-dominant view in traditional historiography. By concretizing the actual membership of this late imperial professional community and the institutional and social contexts of its rise, Professor Chen develops a clearer understanding of its composition, functions, and historical development, and how its underexamined formation and transformation unfolded within the broader context of Chinese law and legal traditions.
Moreover, this lecture will highlights the productive contradictions within the official ideology of late imperial China: the imperial state’s avowed commitment to Confucian moral governance was accompanied by a deepening reliance on technocratic administration and legal expertise. At the same time, this reconstruction enables an examination of how the emergence and development of this professional community and field influenced Qing judicial administration, legal culture, and jurisprudence. If official ideology and government policies helped define the status, identity, and careers of these individuals, then the growth of their community and professional field had significant implications for state ideology, policies, and strategy.
Presenter
CHEN Li, J.D. (UIUC) and Ph.D. (Columbia), is Associate Professor of Chinese History at the University of Toronto, with a cross-appointment at the Faculty of Law. Among his extensive publications on the intersection of law, culture, and politics in Chinese and international history, his first monograph, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics (Columbia University Press, 2016), received the 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize of the Association for Asian Studies and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History. He has just completed another monograph, Invisible Power and Technocratic Governance: Legal Specialists, Juridical Capital, and Ideological Politics in Late Imperial China, c. 1650–1910.
Commentary
Thomas Duve is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory and Professor for Comparative Legal History at the University of Frankfurt, Germany. He researches legal history from a global perspective and also focuses on the use of the past in law, on colonial law, and on the methods of legal history and of comparative law.
ZHANG Taisu is Professor of Law at Yale Law School and holds secondary appointments at Yale in the History Department and the Jackson School. He works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics.
