A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

A much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines Chinas unique political-legal culture.

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 Chinas 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. Chinas political-legal culture is marked by a mistrust of laws powers, and as a result, it privileges substantive over procedural justice. Calling on a wide array of narrativesstories of crime and punishment, subterfuge and exposé, guilt and redemptionA Certain Justice helps us recognize the fight for justice outside the familiar arenas of liberal democracy and the rule of law. See more