Saturday, December 30, 2017

Resources for Chinese Law and History

This marks the end of my one month guest blogging stint here at LHB.  Thanks again to the editors for this opportunity, and thanks to the many friends and colleagues who took time to engage the ideas I threw out in my posts.

As I'm heading out the door, here are some basic resources for Chinese legal history that may be of use to a more general audience.  A few institutions maintain online bibliographies of Chinese law and history-related sources: for example, YaleHarvard, and Oxford.  More systematically, for the past decade, scholars at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law have compiled a yearly bibliography of all academic writing on Chinese law in Western languages, and you can find them all on Professor Knut Pissler's SSRN page.  Each list has a specific section on legal history.

If you are interested in communities of scholars who work on these issues, there are several relevant groups on Facebook that have relatively open membership policies: Sinologists, Late Imperial China, and PRC History.  The largest and most important academic society on Chinese legal history outside of Mainland China (although it does draw many members from the Mainland) is the International Society for Chinese Law and History, which now has over 150 members, despite only coming into existence in early 2014.  The Society maintains a newsletter on recent events and publications in the field, and hosts workshops and conferences annually.

And with that, I wish you all a happy and prosperous 2018!  It's been a real pleasure.