Reviews for Chinese Law and Legal Research

The average rating for Chinese Law and Legal Research based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-01-27 00:00:00 Paul Ling This book builds on and surpasses Durkheim and Weber in constructing a pure social theory of law, with implications of a pure sociology for every other facet of social life. That Donald Black does this in about 147 pages is testimony to the clarity, conciseness, and logical rigor of his thought. It is surprisingly easy to read and amazing that he is able to illustrate and back his arguments with evidence from such a wide range of historical, anthropological and other social research. The book raises all kinds of issues that need to be addressed in depth – and he has spawned a literature which seems quite well known in sociology but – at least in my experience – is unknown in economics. I think all social scientists today, including economists, should grapple with this book and its implications. I'll just mention a few of them here. First, even more than Durkheim, he insists on treating social facts as social facts, and not as some confluence of individual or subgroup behaviors. In this, the work aligns more closely with modern complexity theory which would treat social phenomena as emergent properties – not aggregations. I see this as a direct challenge to social theorists like Elster (methodological individualism). But for the field I know best – economics – it exposes the simplistic theorizing done in macroeconomic (and some microeconomic) modelling. It seems to me that mainstream macroeconomics has pushed aside theorists who address macroeconomic phenomena as emergent properties (e.g., think of the ways the paradox of thrift has been driven to the margins), in favor of those who rely on characterizing "representative" consumers and producers. To give a taste of this, here's an example of a social fact when he hypothesizes that: "Law varies inversely with other social control." He then tests this inverse relationship along numerous dimensions. Family members are less likely to sue another family member or report them to the police than they are with respect to those outside their family. In societies where family control of its members is weaker, the tendency to resort to the law is greater than in societies where family control of its members is stronger. The same logic applies to organizations (think corporations) or through time in the same society. Second, each chapter details how this theory of social laws provides a contrasting but equally powerful explanatory system for behaviors which are more frequently explained as outcomes of individual psychology, rational choice, or subgroup cultures. In Black's framing of social phenomena, it isn't the culture or psychology of deviants which makes them deviant. Instead, he poses a theory in which deviance is created by the way law names, isolates and punishes individuals based on their social location (which he defines explicitly and thoroughly). It situates the "problem" of deviance in the exercise of social power rather than individual or subgroup behavior. The risk of the latter approaches occurs when it slips into 'blaming the victim' or excusing the deviant due to contextual determination. By extracting social theory from either of these pitfalls, Black is giving us a very powerful new way to look at deviance. Any social science which concentrates on individuals and subgroup cultures should keep this in mind as a corrective for interpreting their results and developing their research agendas. Today's behavioral economics is incredibly rich and fruitful, but would do well to consider these implications for its own progress. Third, in the interest of creating a social science, Black has proposed a series of testable hypotheses which require eliciting information about inequities, power, and exploitation but which at the same time do not rely on any value judgments. The theory does not eliminate, obviate or ignore values. Indeed, Black's observations and references to historical and anthropological accounts of inequity and the exercise of power are essential to his hypotheses of how law behaves. But it does generate a space for inquiry which distinguishes between positive and normative claims in a way that I would not have thought possible before reading this book. Black admits at one point that he is a "child of the sixties", mostly in terms of his delight in fresh thinking and creativity. I think this is true for the books strengths as well as its flaws. If Black were writing this book today, there are two ways I suspect it would differ. First, though he openly and regularly recounts the facts of discrimination and subjugation of women, too many of his illustrative examples betray themselves as stuck in the past by his use of pronouns. That could be easily remedied in a revised version. The second way it might differ is in the final chapter where he speculates on the future directions of society. He lays out a plausible argument, projecting from the past, that increased intercommunication among peoples leads to greater interdependence, homogenization of language, and interchangeability which, in turn, could lead to a social condition with less law than in today. In an age with resurgent populist and fascist movements, in which people ingeniously invent artificial divisions and assign importance to insignificant differences between groups so as to gain power and exploit others, the implicit trajectory described by Black seems less likely and certainly less inevitable than it might have in 1976. Addressing this particular aspect of the book probably requires another book. Obviously, this had a big impact on me. It strengthened some ways of thinking, challenged others, and now I've got a whole new literature that I have to read – the work his book has inspired.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-09 00:00:00 Alan Roach I found this book fascinating. Miami defense lawyer Roy Black shares four of his cases with us, each case quite different than the others. The first is about a black 20 year old shot in an arcade by a Spanish cop. Miami goes crazy; we'll burn the city down if he is acquitted, we shall overcome etc. Roy Black wades into the furor and wins an acquittal. There are some riots but Miami doesn't burn, it is still there. The next case involves the cold blooded murder of two people by a man who is found cowering in a hole with the money he stole from the people he killed. We hear about the mental illness of the defendant and the life he had as a child and the severe beatings he was given which may have given him brain damage. Roy Black gets him acquitted. The third case involves a young man who shoots his girlfriend, leaves her body in her car at a drive through ATM. He claims it was an accident and he was so upset and he couldn't find the hospital ER and he just panicked. Roy Black gets him acquitted. The fourth case is a federal case against a Cuban banker accused of laundering drug money. Terrifying the power the federal prosecutor's office has. And all the drug dealers they give reduced sentences to in exchange for information. As Roy Black says, powerful inducement to lie. Roy Black gets him acquitted but the government goes after him again and this time won't let him hire Roy Black! This is what Roy Black says about being a defense lawyer. "When most people see me on the nightly news, I am striding into a courtroom beside a person who has been charged with an awful crime: murder, money laundering, rape at a historic mansion. Time and again I hear friends ask me, "How could you defend him?" Or: "Certainly he must have done something or he wouldn't have gotten in trouble, right?" The answer is one that comes out of hard experience in the courts. Ours is an adversary system of justice. This means we determine truth through testing both sides of the story at a trial, not by means of a sixty-second news clip or a talk-radio rant or the latest CNN poll. We have INALIENABLE RIGHTS, meaning ones our government can't take away. Rights are not self-executing. The don't exist unless you have a lawyer to enforce them. Article 125 of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. issued by Stalin in 1936 provided that "the citizens ...are guaranteed by law a) freedom of speech b) freedom of the press c) freedom of assembly including the holding of mass meetings and d) freedom of street processions and demonstrations." But these were just so many words, because Stalin did not provide for attorneys independent of state control to speak for those rights vigorously. He did not offer his people our crucial Sixth Amendment, which allows the accused to "enjoy...the assistance of counsel for his defense." Lawyers are the ones who transform abstract rights into reality." I recommend this book. Upgrading my rating of this book because it is intelligent, thought provoking and stayed bright in my memory while so many other books were quickly forgotten.