@article{1479239,
      recid = {1479239},
      author = {Ruskola, Teemu, },
      title = {Legal Orientalism : China, the United States, and Modern  Law /},
      pages = {1 online resource (338 p.) :},
      abstract = {Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol  of disregard for human rights, while the United States has  positioned itself as the world's chief exporter of the rule  of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about  Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified  empirically, and how did the United States assume the  mantle of law's universal appeal? In a series of  wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the  history of "legal Orientalism": a set of globally  circulating narratives about what law is and who has it.  For example, why is China said not to have a history of  corporate law, as a way of explaining its "failure" to  develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European  tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law  developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire,  influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844  authorized the extraterritorial application of American law  in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism,  this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism  after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its  fullest expression in an American district court's  jurisdiction over the "District of China." With urgent  contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in  the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by  late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and  in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In  the global politics of trade and human rights, legal  Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities,  institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and  unacknowledged ways.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1479239},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674075764},
}