The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China ― Toward a Historical-social Jurisprudence

The assembled articles in The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China illustrate a new “historical-social jurisprudence,” and explore the possible conceptual underpinnings of a modern Chinese legal system that would both accommodate and integrate the unavoidable paradoxes of contemporary China.

Philip C.C. Huang taught at UCLA from 1966 to 2004, advancing to “Professor, Above-Scale” in 1991, and has taught at the Renmin University of China, in the Law School and the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development, since 2005. His major publications are his trilogy on rural China: The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China, 1985; The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350- 1988, 1990; and Beyond the Left-Right Divide: Searching for a Path of Rural Development in China from the History of Practice, in Chinese only, 2014; and his trilogy on Chinese civil justice: Civil Justice in China: Representation and Practice in the Qing, 1996; Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared, 2001; Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present, 2010.Kathryn Bernhardt is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Rents, Taxes, and Peasant Resistance: The Lower Yangzi Region, 1840-1950 (Stanford University Press, 1992; awarded the 1992 John K. Fairbank prize of the American Historical Association) and Women and Property in China, 960-1949 (Stanford University Press, 1999) and co-editor (with Philip C. C. Huang) of Civil Law in Qing and Republican China (Stanford University Press, 1994). She has served as the coeditor of Modern China: An International Journal of History and Social Science from 1998 to the present.