Case and Code in the Chinese Legal Tradition

The Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory invites paper presentations for the second conference of a working group dedicated to exploring the history of a distinctly Chinese legal tradition linking the imperial past to the legal regimes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The theme of this and the subsequent volume planned to convey the results of the workshop is “Case and Code in the Chinese Legal Tradition.”

The conference aims to:

1. pinpoint specific sites of continuity and disjuncture in the juridical practices of the Chinese legal tradition;

2. identify processual and material characteristics of the production, translation, and negotiation of normativity in the Chinese legal tradition;

3. produce an analytical and conceptual language for comparative histories of the Chinese legal tradition.

Applicants are invited to propose individual or group research papers that pertain to the theme of the conference. Special consideration will be offered to projects covering time periods not yet represented in the conference (early China, middle China, and the first half of the twentieth century are currently lacking) and to those whose subjects or methodology offer strong potential for comparison across the various times and spaces of the Chinese legal tradition.

This is an internal workshop limited to admitted participants only.

Please find further information on the related research project here.