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.
Richard Posner: How Many Constitutions Can Liberals Have?
Richard Posner: How Many Constitutions Can Liberals Have? (Or, A Lawyer’s Dozen)
(A book review of Akhil Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By)
An excerpt from the beginning part:
Actually, despite the book’s title, it is not two in one—it is twelve in one. There is not just one unwritten constitution, in Amar’s reckoning; there are eleven of them. There is an “implicit” constitution, a “lived” constitution, a “Warrented” constitution (the reference is to Earl Warren), a “doctrinal” constitution, a “symbolic” constitution, a “feminist” constitution, a “Georgian” constitution (the reference is to George Washington), an “institutional” constitution, a “partisan” constitution (the reference is to political parties, which are not mentioned in the written Constitution), a “conscientious” constitution (which, for example, permits judges and jurors to ignore valid law), and an “unfinished” constitution that Amar is busy finishing. All these unwritten constitutions, in Amar’s view, are authoritative. And miraculously, when correctly interpreted, they all cohere, both with each other and with the written Constitution. The sum of the twelve constitutions is the Constitution.
One is tempted to say that this is preposterous, and leave it at that. But it is an attempt to respond to the felt need of professors of constitutional law, and of judges who rule on constitutional cases (particularly Supreme Court justices), to find, or at least to assert, an objective basis for constitutional decisions. On the eve of the Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act—a time of liberal panic—Amar was quoted as saying that if the Court invalidated the act “then yes, it’s disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud. Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn’t. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty.” But the constitutional “law” that matters to Amar is not what other lawyers understand law to be. It is a palimpsest of twelve constitutions, only one of which is real.
» 继续阅读 Richard Posner: How Many Constitutions Can Liberals Have? 全文
刘忠：规模与内部治理：中国法院编制变迁三十年
晚近以来，程序正义理论的一个基本命题认为只有经由“中立第三方”主持、双方当事人平等对抗下的三角结构，所得出的结论才是唯一可接受的结果[1]。其方法论立场系出于自然科学：古典物理学为便利研究，将运动中的物体如赛马、帆船等视为一个可以不考虑大小，无体积、形状的“质点”（mass point），从而引入几何学坐标系进行计算。近代以来，人文、社科研究受自然科学研究方式影响甚重[2]。然而，人文、社会研究中，这种方式的物理简约却可能自我斩断能对事态作出真正有力的解释的因果关系项。
将法院看作一个“质点”在程序法内跃动，忽略了法院是一个有着复杂的内部结构关系的组织，忽视了法院的构成尤其是编制规模导致的内部治理所产生的组织内行为会对组织外程序的产生决定性的影响。
本文对三十年（1978-2008）中国法院编制规模作出尽可能细致的数据变化描述，以此为逻辑起点，在“内部组织结构——外部程序行为”这一视域下，展开对以下问题的初步分析：
政治治理观念转型，将更多公共治理职能转移给法院担当，由此导致的三十年法院编制规模巨观化，使得法院内部组织出现了非预期的后果，即表象上的日趋坚硬的科层化，及由此所导致的结构上的困境，即司法行为的作出，被内部组织样态所决定，产生巨大的负外部性，原本期望的国家政治治理方式转变目标恰恰因追求目标的手段自身而被削弱。在学理上，以法院为中心的法治化新叙事，获得了正当程序理论“中立第三方”命题的理论支持。在不反思这一命题的前提下的诸种对策，被1998年以来的司法改革经验证实效果不彰。法院编制激增，不仅带来司法效率问题，也导致了新的“宪政时刻”问题。
一、三十年（1978-2008）编制变迁 » 继续阅读 刘忠：规模与内部治理：中国法院编制变迁三十年 全文
冯象：法学的历史批判——答《北大法律评论》
二〇〇八年您写了《法学三十年：重新出发》，文中提到中国法学“最大的挑战，不在体制内的腐败和控制（如买卖学位、竞贿评估、大小山头争夺资源），而是全球化即全球美国化的形势下，中国法学整体上的边缘化、殖民地化……主流法学在话语层面已广泛接受美国的影响，跨入了‘美国时代’”。时隔四年，回顾一下，中国法学的建树还是不少。比如，北大法学院强世功老师试图通过“不成文宪法”的概念来重构实践中的中国宪制；章永乐老师的专著《旧邦新造》，则是取政治学和法学双重视角，探讨晚清至民国的宪政史；山东大学田雷老师最近提交“八二宪法”纪念研讨会的论文，《 “差序格局”、反定型化与未完全理论化合意——中国宪政模式的一种叙述》，也是一种重构的努力。您如何看待学术界这些新的努力？
开了新风气呢。我们在课上讲过田老师分析的教科书迷思，叫作“中国有宪法而无宪政”。那迷思的根据是，中国的体制缺了违宪审查程序，宪法争议不能诉讼，宪法文本悬在虚空里了——类似《政法笔记》引的那句老百姓大白话：“它没宪法”。但是，“没宪法”不等于“无宪政”。田老师借用费孝通先生的“差序格局”等学说来讨论中国的宪政格局，是大胆的创见。我想强老师也是这个意思，除了几部宪法，我们还应当研究“中国特色”的宪制的方方面面，包括“不成文”的或法律本本之后、之上的宪政惯例。
当代中国语境下宪法文本的一个特点，也是传统宪法学上的难处，是脱离现实政治。“八二宪法”虽有几次修订，如添加了社会主义法治、私有产权保护和尊重人权的语言，但都是宣示性质，小心翼翼地跟改革开放以来的制度实践保持着安全距离。道理很简单，那些制度实践多数经不起违宪审查，哪怕是程序性的审查。而且，“违宪”一旦引入现实政治，即有违反《宪法》的哪一部分、哪一句话的争论：到底是背离了序言所规定的马列主义、毛泽东思想指引下的人民民主专政和社会主义道路，还是具体的、争议各方可作彼此牴牾的解释的条款文字？前些年，学界跟媒体关于《物权法》草案的激烈辩论，就是一次预演。差点把“不争论”的告诫撇一边去了。
历史地看，“八二宪法”可说是清末以降所有宪法文本中，最具宪政张力即潜能的一部宪法。由于建设中的法治（我称之为“形式法治”）必须以宪法为基础而获得并展示其合法性，“八二宪法”便成了中国体制“落后”（拿形式法治的原则来衡量）的一个表征。正是这巨大的张力，使得不时修宪有了政治动力，从而避免了现行《宪法》像之前的文本那样，完全为政治抛离。 » 继续阅读 冯象：法学的历史批判——答《北大法律评论》 全文
冯象：知识产权或孔雀尾巴
与S君谈
冯老师，读了您的文章《知识产权的终结》，我有几点困惑，能否聊聊？您扯开去谈也行。现在好像不仅仅中国，世界各地甚至欧美发达国家，盗版和“山寨”产品都大行其道。这方面的报道和评论很多，一般认为是知识产权及相关法律不健全造成的，您同意吗？
恐怕不能这么说。如果知识产权法还叫“不健全”，世上恐怕没有健全的法律了。因为各国的知识产权立法都是美国推动，拿国际条约和双边/多边协定做框架，背后则是主导全球贸易的美国法标准；至少在“主要贸易伙伴”之间，法律规范、学理解释甚而条款用语的同质化程度，已经相当高了。
所以出了问题，业内人士都怪执法，还怪一个叫“体制”的东西。
中国就是这毛病，老批自己，跟着美国的调门批，坐实了人家的指控。说实话，知识产权乃至业已宣布建成的整个法律制度，是不是建国以来最健全的时候？谁不承认，即有肯定上世纪五六十年代的“无法无天”之嫌，那可是严重的偏离“政治正确”，呵呵。法律如此紧密地接轨国际（读作照搬美国），却仍然担了“不健全”的恶名，而且是官方宣传口径，这里头一定有什么不便明言的难处。
这话怎么讲？
“不健全”是委婉语。说白了，就是知识产权为市场经济“保驾护航”不力，照顾不了它的首要服务对象即资本的利益，走到头了。乍一听，此话有点反常识。可是谁有那个能力，且受益于，抛弃知识产权——以及支撑它的形式化的“普世价值”法权意识形态，我称之为“形式法治”——除了资本，新世纪全球化的资本市场和资本竞争？ » 继续阅读 冯象：知识产权或孔雀尾巴 全文
