Book Review: A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

Abstract

While there is already much excellent work in the genre of Chinese Law and Literature, Haiyan Lee’s A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination (University of Chicago Press 2023) sets a new standard for the field. This is a review Lee’s smart and ambitious book, which far exceeds the bounds of both law and literature, expanding into adjacent fields of legal and literary humanities: history, political theory, moral philosophy, and cognitive psychology, to name just some of the many literatures on which Lee draws. A Certain Justice is filled with exciting local and global insights, some of which are dazzling.

Keywords: justice, Haiyan Lee, orientalism, socialist China, liberal capitalism, law, history, Chinese legal imagination