The Russian Empire and its legal institutions have often been associated with arbitrariness, corruption, and the lack of a 'rule of law'. Stefan B. Kirmse challenges these assumptions in this important new study of empire-building, minority rights, and legal practice in late Tsarist Russia, revealing how legal reform transformed ordinary people's interaction with state institutions from the 1860s to the 1890s. By focusing on two regions that stood out for their ethnic and religious diversity, the book follows the spread of the new legal institutions into the open steppe of Southern Russia, especially Crimea, and into the fields and forests of the Middle Volga region around the ancient Tatar capital of Kazan. It explores the degree to which the courts served as instruments of integration: the integration of former borderlands with the imperial centre and the integration of the empire's internal 'others' with the rest of society.
This book provides an introduction to the legal system in Hong Kong. Understanding Hong Kong's legal system today requires both an understanding of the British origins of much of the laws and legal institutions as well as the uniquely Hong Kong developments in the application of the Basic Law under 'one country, two systems'. These features of the Hong Kong legal system are explored in this book, which takes into account developments in the two decades or so of the new legal framework in Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. In providing both an exposition of the legal institutions in Hong Kong and legal method under Hong Kong's legal system (including practical guidance and examples on case law, statutory interpretation and legal research), this book is ideal for first-year law students, students of other disciplines who study law and readers who have an interest in Hong Kong's unique legal system.
