Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article proposes a thorough ‘rectification of names’ take place in comparative legal studies, with a specific focus on Chinese law. Pioneering Chinese comparative law scholars focused on describing the Chinese legal system using Western legal terminology. The job of the second-generation of legal scholars, however, is to interpret both the primary source material and prior interpretations. There are many pitfalls entailed with studying non-Western law, foremost is the danger of one’s conceptual paradigms influencing an interpretation. Any culture’s legal order is uniquely tuned to a cultural context, and Chinese culture represents a social order with sufficient coherence for scholars to develop useful generalizations about legal sensibility and legal order. Law is a reflection of culture and a producer of it, thus to understand Chinese legal order, one must understand the categories of meaning through which the Chinese make sense of lives and experience.
Recommended Citation
Janet Ainsworth,
Categories and Culture: On the 'Rectification of Names' in Comparative Law, 82 CORNELL L. REV. 19
(1996).
https://digitalcommons.law.seattleu.edu/faculty/617