The Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures is delighted to announce the upcoming Kang Endowed Lecture featuring Professor Haiyan Lee at Stanford University on February 9, 2024 (Friday). As part of this annual event, a lunch seminar will commence at 11:30, led by Professor Lee, focusing on her recent book, A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination, published by Chicago University Press. The book has been praised as "a much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines China’s unique political-legal culture.” This seminar welcomes both faculty members and graduate students interested in China studies, legal history, ecological studies, and related fields. Participants in the discussion session with Professor Lee will receive hardcopies of the book. Your presence will enrich this scholarly dialogue, and we look forward to your participation.
Please RSVP to jingling@illinois.edu or yy45@illinois.edu by Dec 6 (Wed).
A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination by Haiyan Lee.
About the Book:
To many outsiders, China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from a skewed understanding of China’s political-legal culture, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice.
In the Chinese legal imagination, Lee shows, justice is a vertical concept, with low justice between individuals firmly subordinated to the high justice of the state. China’s political-legal culture is marked by a mistrust of law’s powers, and as a result, it privileges substantive over procedural justice. Calling on a wide array of narratives—stories of crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemption—A Certain Justice helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and the rule of law.