Possible: Recent Trends in Chinese Legal History Studies in the United States and Their Implications

The study of Chinese legal history has undergone a tremendous change in the United States since the 1990s. Antiquated views and biased opinions of past decades have been rethought and criticized to a considerable extent. At the cutting edge of this new academic trend is the UCLA research group of Chinese legal history. Their scholarship as a whole exemplifies the features of what this article calls a “new Chinese legal history”—namely, conjoining the empirical (the extensive use of judicial archives in China) with the theo-retical (drawing upon and dialoguing with well-established theories in social sciences), with the intention of formulating new and illuminating middle-level concepts. Moreover, their keen “historical sense ” helps us understand the historical roots of contemporary problems, thus overcoming the episte-mological problem of Chinese legal history studies often being regarded as useless. at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 16, 2016mcx.sagepub.comDownloaded fro