[author]Sida Liu
[content]
Chinese Socio-Legal Studies in Global Perspective
Sida Liu
Deputy Director, China Institute for Socio-Legal Studies, Shanghai Jiao Tong University
My topic today is “Chinese socio-legal studies in global perspective.” I want to sketch where Chinese socio-legal studies stand within the global field and what the overall landscape looks like.
The recent debate in China between so-called “socio-legal approaches” and “doctrinal legal scholarship” is, in my view, quite interesting. Why? Because from a global perspective, in most countries the sociology of law is very much a “fringe” field. Whether in law schools, sociology departments, or other social-science units, it occupies a relatively marginal position rather than the mainstream.
This is easy to understand. At its core, socio-legal studies are a domain that “cultivates sensibilities”: they offer new perspectives—different lenses—for understanding how law operates and for making sense of diverse legal phenomena. As Professor Zuo just noted, the distinction between “law in the books” and “law in action” gives us fresh ways to observe new phenomena.
But unlike many doctrinal subfields—or law-and-economics analyses—socio-legal research does not directly help a judge decide a case or a lawyer try one. From this angle, the field’s peripheral status is perfectly normal.
This is also why I have never quite understood the anxieties of recent years. We are only dozens of people doing socio-legal work; we put a different “label” on ourselves—calling it a “socio-legal approach” rather than “sociology of law”—and held a few dialogues with doctrinal scholars. Yet this somehow triggered great alarm, as if we were posing a major threat and even turning things into a “life-or-death” zero-sum struggle. I have never quite understood why.
The only plausible explanation is a lack of confidence among some observers—perhaps a fear that we might “take their jobs.” I think that cannot happen; the discipline’s character makes it unlikely. Conversely, we who work in socio-legal studies should also be self-aware about our position in the legal academy: we will remain a peripheral field. We will not become the mainstream, let alone the core, of legal scholarship.
I want to address two main questions today. First, what is the global state of socio-legal studies? Let me offer a brief overview. Second, if Chinese socio-legal studies are to claim a place on the global stage, what can we contribute, and what should we do?
First, the global landscape. At a broad level there are two large traditions. One is primarily American: the Law and Society movement that took off in the 1950s–60s. Many of my senior colleagues from my years teaching at the University of Wisconsin—and several professors at the University of California, Berkeley—were among its founders.
That movement is now more than fifty years old. The Law and Society Association (LSA) was founded in 1964; the association, now well into middle age and facing its own “midlife crisis,” has encountered various issues. Even so, it remains the world’s largest socio-legal organization, with about 1,500 members. Roughly two-thirds are Americans or scholars studying and teaching at U.S. institutions. The remaining 500 are international members scattered across Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, Australia (where colleagues fly more than 24 hours and fight jet lag to attend the annual meeting), as well as Asia. In recent years, many scholars from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore have participated. From Mainland China, not many travel over each year; I know that Professor Ji Weidong has attended almost every year, Professor Li Jianyong goes nearly every year, and others go occasionally.
If you attend the LSA annual meeting, you will find that socio-legal studies there are divided into many subfields: the legal profession, dispute resolution, criminal justice, legal consciousness, legal development, legal globalization, legal psychology, studies of law-related behavior, and many other law-and-society topics—at least thirty subfields by a rough count. Each has its own Collaborative Research Network (CRN) with global members who organize panels at the conference. This is the U.S.-led organization.
Another is Europe-led: the Research Committee on the Sociology of Law (RCSL). Its members are mainly from European countries, including the U.K. and the Continent, along with some Japanese scholars. Professor Ji Weidong is a very senior member—he spent many years in Japan doing socio-legal research and has long been active in their activities. RCSL is smaller—only a few hundred members—and holds its annual meetings primarily in Europe.
Their orientations differ. U.S. socio-legal research tends to be more empirical, emphasizing data and various forms of empirical inquiry. European socio-legal research is more theory-driven: the empirical datasets and analyses may be less fine-grained than those in the U.S., but the theoretical framing is often grander and more elegant. The emphases differ.
Besides these two, other national associations exist in the U.K., Australia, Canada, and elsewhere.
I have long admired Israel: despite being a small country, it has one of the strongest socio-legal communities anywhere. Every year it holds a national socio-legal meeting with over a hundred scholars—quite an achievement. In recent years, Brazil has also formed its own association. Other major emerging economies, such as India and Russia, remain at an embryonic stage in socio-legal development, perhaps not yet as advanced as China.
Another new development worth noting is the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA), founded just last year. I hope everyone will keep an eye on it. It is primarily organized by Asian scholars—currently led by colleagues from Japan, with participation from South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan; Professor Ji and I both served on the preparatory committee, and Hou Meng also took part.
Formed last year, ALSA aims to promote socio-legal research, exchange, and collaboration across Asia—currently centered on East and Southeast Asia, with potential expansion to South Asia and the Middle East. Its first annual meeting will be held in Singapore on September 22–23 this year. If you are interested, you can look it up online or contact me for details. The second annual meeting is tentatively planned for Taiwan next year, likely in mid-December. In fact, East and Southeast Asia are now among the most vibrant regions for socio-legal studies outside North America and Western Europe—more developed than Latin America or Eastern Europe, in my view. That is the basic global picture.
Let me now turn to how Chinese socio-legal studies can contribute internationally and carve out a place of our own. I have three points.
First and most fundamentally, whether we seek “indigenization” or “internationalization,” whether we want to do something distinctive from others or engage with mainstream global theories and debates, the key is to do good research. If your scholarship is solid, good outcomes will follow.
From this perspective, our field in China is at a critical juncture. Why? As Professor Qi just reviewed, I have also written two pieces on the history of socio-legal studies in China: a Chinese article in 2010, published in “Law and Social Sciences,” and, at a colleague’s invitation, an English article last year. When I wrote that 2009–2010 Chinese article, I was quite pessimistic. Professor Qi very kindly sent me a set of materials from the 1980s; after a careful read, I found that the field’s history in China has been quite tortuous. The momentum in the mid-to-late 1980s was strong, with many senior scholars—Professor Qi, Professor Ji, Professor Ge, among others—involved. But it was cut short for reasons we all know.
In the 1990s came a second intellectual tradition, led mainly by Professor Su Li. But as Professor Su later shifted his scholarly focus to Posnerian law and economics, by the time I wrote in 2009, very few in China were doing sustained socio-legal research. Many stayed at home “writing” so-called socio-legal articles that were, in fact, not socio-legal in substance.
In recent years, however, things have changed significantly. We must mention scholars such as Hou Meng, Chen Baifeng, and You Chenjun. Beyond rallying the banner of the socio-legal approach, more importantly, a cohort of younger scholars—my age or younger—have truly entered the field: collecting materials and data, conducting interviews and fieldwork, and analyzing them rigorously—doing socio-legal research in earnest.
Why do I say this is a key moment? Because I believe Chinese socio-legal studies have reached a stage where further differentiation is needed.
As I noted, LSA divides the field into many subfields. We are not there yet, and it may be unrealistic to carve things that finely now. But at minimum, we should discuss what the subfields of Chinese socio-legal studies are. My own work is on the legal profession; there are not many of us studying China’s legal profession, though many are in this room today. If we work together on areas like the Chinese bar or the judiciary, a body of literature can accumulate. The formation of a subfield requires such accumulation.
In other areas—say, criminal justice—many mainstream scholars have started doing this work, and a literature is building. But numerous socio-legal topics remain understudied. Take legal consciousness: China has very little solid empirical work. We have some large-N surveys, but truly ethnographic studies that probe how ordinary people understand law are rare—almost a blank.
China’s rapid urbanization has created a host of legal issues—such as land takings and demolitions—yet few study these systematically. The relationship between law and social movements is another open field. Many topics are ripe for inquiry, but we lack cumulative literatures. Ultimately, we need to do our scholarship well and stake out a presence in each domain.
Two final points. We should not only publish in Chinese outlets but also submit to mainstream international socio-legal journals. This is not easy. Almost every month colleagues in China ask me to look at an English paper and whether it could be published abroad.
In roughly 90% of cases, the manuscript is simply a direct translation of a Chinese article. Such work is unlikely to be published internationally. The scholarly apparatus and writing conventions differ markedly: internationally, one typically poses a clear question, engages theory, lays out data and methods, and then presents empirical analysis. There is, so to speak, a familiar “template,” and you must write in ways that converse with the theoretical literature your readers know. If you are interested in publishing internationally, consider collaborating with scholars trained abroad; that can help.
Lastly, beyond publishing, I hope more colleagues will take part in international socio-legal activities—whether in the U.S. or Europe, or, more accessibly, in places closer to home. If the U.S. or Europe is too far, Singapore or Taiwan is not. Active participation in ALSA’s events will help you meet peers and hone your scholarship. I will stop here. Thank you.