Rethinking Chinese Jurisprudence and Exploring Its Future

A Sociology of Knowledge Perspective

This book is an antecedent study on the task facing China's legal science, more strictly speaking — China's legal philosophy, in post-Cold War world structure. In broader terms, this is an academic study of China's own “identity” and future in the world structure. The author believes that from 1978 to 2004, in spite of its great achievements, China's legal science has at the same time had some of its grave problems being exposed. A fundamental problem is its failure to provide a “Chinese legal ideal picture” as the standard of and direction for evaluating, assessing and guiding China's law/legal development. This is an age of law without China's own ideal picture(s). However, why has China failed to have its own legal ideal picture(s)? Apparently this question in and of itself implies a question, both more directly and fundamentally, of China's legal science, namely why China's legal science has failed to provide China's own legal picture(s)? Or, as an internal critical approach may suggest (namely to critique China's legal science from the perspective of its promised objectives), where is China's legal science heading? Based on this, this book attempts to expound a standard to evaluate China's legal science through a theoretical discussion of this issue, and to further explore the possible direction for China's legal science beyond this age.

Contents:

• Introduction
• China's Legal Science and the “Paradigm of Modernization”
• A Critique and Reflection on the “Paradigm of Modernization”
• The Absence of “China” in Chinese Legal Scholarship: A Case Study of the Legal Research on “Consumers' Rights”
• Further Critical Examination of China's Legal Science (1): A Critique of Liang Zhiping's “Legal Culturalism”
• Further Examination of China's Legal Science (Part 2): A Critique of Su Li's “Indigenous Resourcism”
• Some Tentative Concluding Remarks

Readership: Researchers, professionals, undergraduate and graduate students interested in China's legal science and legal philosophy studies.
Key Features:

• This book is written by a prominent scholar in China's social sciences in general and jurisprudence in particular. The Chinese version of this book is one of the most important, and also best-selling, academic books on China's legal science since 1949. It surveys, in general, the development of China's jurisprudence in the past three decades, with a critical eye on how it has colluded with China's ticket to board the ship of globalisation
• This book addresses not only legal science, but social sciences in general. As the only author ranked most-cited in six disciplines in China, Deng has a broader concern than most writers who confine their studies within the narrow boundaries of particular academic disciplines. This shall interest readers on a wider scale in the international market
• This book will open up the discussions on alternative or indigenous studies in international social sciences. Although seemingly a topic addressing China's jurisprudence, readers from other cultures, nations and disciplines shall find this book inspiring to the extent that it provides fresh perspectives than the West-dominated ones that have been leading the globalisation of law