活動

2017年1月19日

4:30pm–6:00pm

Warren Chan Moot Court, The CUHK Graduate Law Centre, 2/F, Bank of America Tower, 12 Harcourt Road, Central, Hong Kong

Teemu Ruskola, Professor of Law, Emory Law School

Professor Teemu Ruskola teaches law at Emory Law School. After graduating from Yale Law School, Professor Ruskola worked as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, in New York and Hong Kong. Prior to joining Emory, he was professor of law at American University in Washington, DC. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, and Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. His wide-ranging scholarship addresses questions of legal history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point.

Registration: http://www.law.cuhk.edu.hk/Teemu_Ruskola_Reg

law@cuhk.edu.hk

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In this talk, Professor Ruskola will discuss his book Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press 2013), recently translated as 法律东方主义: 中国, 美国与现代法律 (China University of Political Science and Law Press 2016). The book examines how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today.

Conducted in English