New Book: Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law. By Teemu Ruskola
Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law（《法律东方主义：中国·美国·现代法律》）. By Teemu Ruskola. Harvard University Press 2013. ISBN: 0674073061, 9780674073067.
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. » 继续阅读 New Book: Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law. By Teemu Ruskola 全文
New Book: The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. By Marcia Coyle
The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. By Marcia Coyle. Simon & Schuster 2013. ISBN: 1451627513; 9781451627510.
The Roberts Court, seven years old, sits at the center of a constitutional maelstrom. Through four landmark decisions, Marcia Coyle, one of the most prestigious experts on the Supreme Court, reveals the fault lines in the conservative-dominated Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
Seven minutes after President Obama put his signature to a landmark national health care insurance program, a lawyer in the office of Florida GOP attorney general Bill McCollum hit a computer key, sparking a legal challenge to the new law that would eventually reach the nation’s highest court. Health care is only the most visible and recent front in a battle over the meaning and scope of the U.S. Constitution. The battleground is the United States Supreme Court, and one of the most skilled, insightful, and trenchant of its observers takes us close up to watch it in action.
Marcia Coyle’s brilliant inside account of the High Court captures four landmark decisions—concerning health care, money in elections, guns at home, and race in schools. Coyle examines how those cases began—the personalities and conflicts that catapulted them onto the national scene—and how they ultimately exposed the great divides among the justices, such as the originalists versus the pragmatists on guns and the Second Amendment, and corporate speech versus human speech in the controversial Citizens United campaign case. Most dramatically, her analysis shows how dedicated conservative lawyers and groups are strategizing to find cases and crafting them to bring up the judicial road to the Supreme Court with an eye on a receptive conservative majority.
The Roberts Court offers a ringside seat at the struggle to lay down the law of the land. » 继续阅读 New Book: The Roberts Court: The Struggle for the Constitution. By Marcia Coyle 全文
New Book: Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner
Reflections on Judging. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press 2013. ISBN: 0674725085, 9780674725089
In Reflections on Judging, Richard Posner distills the experience of his thirty-one years as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. Surveying how the judiciary has changed since his 1981 appointment, he engages the issues at stake today, suggesting how lawyers should argue cases and judges decide them, how trials can be improved, and, most urgently, how to cope with the dizzying pace of technological advance that makes litigation ever more challenging to judges and lawyers.
For Posner, legal formalism presents one of the main obstacles to tackling these problems. Formalist judges—most notably Justice Antonin Scalia—needlessly complicate the legal process by advocating “canons of constructions” (principles for interpreting statutes and the Constitution) that are confusing and self-contradictory. Posner calls instead for a renewed commitment to legal realism, whereby a good judge gathers facts, carefully considers context, and comes to a sensible conclusion that avoids inflicting collateral damage on other areas of the law. This, Posner believes, was the approach of the jurists he most admires and seeks to emulate: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo, Learned Hand, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly, and it is an approach that can best resolve our twenty-first-century legal disputes.
Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.
刘晓明：对西方资本主义困境的观察与思考
2008年9月，以美国雷曼兄弟倒台为标志，西方发达国家陷入了一场严重的金融危机。近五年过去，这场危机非但没有结束，反而从金融、经济问题蔓延到政治、社会领域，“急症”转成“顽症”，使西方陷入全方位困境。 » 继续阅读 刘晓明：对西方资本主义困境的观察与思考 全文
冯象：《摩西五经》修订版缀言
《摩西五经》初版是二〇〇五年春节过后脱稿的，一晃七年过去。其间于俗务之余译注了《智慧书》与《新约》，攒得些经验体会；“回头再看，就见出许多不足”（《创世记·修订版后记》），于是到了修订的时节。
译文的变动，粗粗算来，将近五千处。大多是进一步节俭文字、锤炼风格，但也有勘误、取别解或新说的。那初版的底本，原是八十年代中在哈佛念书时用的斯图加特旧版希伯来文传统本《圣经》（BHS, 1976），从《智慧书》开始，才换成第五版BHS（1997）。后者的注释，总体而言较旧版保守，反映了西方古典及中古语文研究的潮流。这次修订，生僻语词的校读，除开个别无善解多歧义的，一般就参照新版。
夹注，《摩西五经》不如《新约》详细，趁此机会增添两项内容：一是简要补充古代近东宗教、历史文化跟经文串解的知识；二是列出中文旧译一些有代表性的舛误——主要是和合本，因其流传较广，常被引用——方便读者对照查阅。
另有少数拗口的人名地名，做了减字换字或谐音意译。如《民数记》二十二章，善解城先知、比珥之子巴兰（Balaam，源自希腊语七十士本），据原文发音改作比兰（bil`am，谐音混乱，bela`）；再如《创世纪》三十八章，犹大三个儿子取名厄尔、俄男、安儿（参较和合本：珥、俄南、示拉），是谐音意译，反讽暗示三人或因作恶而丧生，或未能尽到小叔娶寡嫂“替哥哥结子实”的义务，致使家庭不得安宁。
本书初版问世迄今，几乎每天收到各地读者和信友的电邮，“提问、商榷、谈心得或祝祷，于我都是极大的勉励”（《新约·前言》）。在此谨表谢忱，并希望这第二版也能给诸君送上一份“生命的粮”。昔日，见不足者有言：
如果译经是与圣者相遇，修订
便是“面对面同他交谈”
如摩西受嘱托：一次又一次
灵中狂喜，决口心堤。
二〇一二年五月于清华园
《摩西五经》（修订版），冯象译注，牛津大学出版社·香港，2013。
冯象讲座：耶稣的家谱——神为什么向死而生
《北大法律评论》学术沙龙·第三讲
冯象：耶稣的家谱——神为什么向死而生
主讲：冯象 清华大学法学院汝璈法学讲席教授
时间：2013年4月1日（周一）晚7:00
地点：北京大学法学院凯原楼一楼报告厅
冯象，上海人，少年负笈云南边疆，北京大学英美文学硕士、哈佛大学中古文学博士（Ph.D）和耶鲁大学法律博士（J.D）。现为清华大学法学院汝璈法学讲席教授。
冯象先生的主要著作有：《贝奥武甫：古英语史诗》（三联书店，1992年）、《中国知识产权》（Sweet & Maxwell, 1997; 增订版2003年）、《木腿正义》（中山大学出版社1999年; 北京大学出版社2007年增订版）、《玻璃岛–亚瑟与我三千年》(三联书店，2003年)、 《政法笔记》（江苏人民出版社，2004年；北京大学2011年增订版）、《创世记》（江苏人民出版社，2004年；北京大学2012年增订版）、《摩西五经》（牛津大学出版社，香港，2006年）、《宽宽信箱与出埃及记》（三联书店，2006年）《智慧书》（牛津大学出版社，香港，2008年）、《新约》（牛津大学出版社2010年）、《信与忘》（三联书店，2012年）及法学评论、小说、诗歌若干。
在本次讲座中，冯象先生将从《马太福音》、《路加福音》对耶稣诞生的不同描述谈起，讨论与之相关的神学、政治以及伦理问题。“神为什么向死而生”，即上帝为何要化作人的肉身，让人子耶稣来这世上受苦、遭罪？这一问题对西方千百年来的社会、文化、思想脉络有何影响？以及和我们今天的现实处境又有何关联？……
《北大法律评论》
2013年3月27日
冯象：“奥维德的书” ——读布朗微奇《大卫诗面面观》
《木腿正义》下编之五
说到威尔士“诗仙”大卫·阿普规林，有句名言常被人引用，那就是 W.J. Gruffydd 为第十一版《大英百科全书》“威尔士文学”条写的：“若不是因为他的七音诗（cywyddau）绝对不留转译的余地，大卫保准会跻身于中世纪最伟大诗人的行列。”
这观点最简单的证明，对于熟悉十四世纪英国文学的读者来说，莫过于拿大卫和乔叟相比。他们俩差不多是同代人（大卫的生卒年代，我们没有可靠的记载，但根据他诗里零星涉及的同时代人物、事件，可以肯定他的创作成熟于十四世纪五、六十年代，比乔叟早十多年）；都是南方人，很早便有机会接触上层社会流行的法国文化；都站到本民族新文学的起跑线上，面对着北方旧传统行将瓦解的壮观：英格兰西北，是古老的头韵体诗歌的最后堡垒，《加文爵士与绿骑士》的家乡；威尔士北部，则是哺育了七个世纪“众王公的歌手”的古国奎纳泽（Gwynedd）故地——直到一二八二年英王爱德华一世占领威尔士，“末代王子”佘威林（Llywelyn）遇难，奎纳泽宫廷的歌声才沉默了。歌手们投奔地方贵族（uchelwyr）的庄园，诗歌日趋保守，着意用典而诘屈聱牙，号称“接班人”（Gogynfeirdd）时代。大卫和乔叟，都不是学究，因而绝少因循守旧的习气；学诗伊始，便大胆借用外国的思想和表达。查一查辞典，中世纪进入英语和威尔士语的法语词，有一大批归他们的功劳。
当然，这两种语言的历史大不相似。乔叟步入诗坛的时候，英语作为文学语言，刚从诺曼人征服英国的打击下喘过气来，尚在康复阶段；而威尔士的独立地位虽已一去不复返，威尔士语却并未遭受重创[1]。乔叟身上看不到《贝奥武甫》的影子；大卫却是从小听着塔列森（Taliesin）和阿涅林（Aneirin）的故事长大的[2]。从十四世纪欧洲文学的大形势看，两国同处西方边陲，文化交流上始终借多还少。法国宫廷诗人德尚（约1346-1406）称赞乔叟，是因为他把《玫瑰传奇》译介到英国，不愧为“大翻译家”；而英国迟至一七八九年才出版了第一部大卫诗选[3]。然而，他们都在本民族诗歌为新题材寻求新格律的时刻，起了关键作用。在英诗，是乔叟示范成功的五重音对句和“御制七行体”[4]；在威尔士诗，则是在大卫手里完善的七音诗与谐音律（cynghanedd）[5]。他们用这些诗格写下的不朽之作，代表了本民族中古文学的最高成就。 » 继续阅读 冯象：“奥维德的书” ——读布朗微奇《大卫诗面面观》 全文
