(with Xu, Ting) 'The city as laboratory and the urban-rural
divide: the revival of private property and its limits in urban China' (2008)
China perspectives, 4 . pp. 26-34
This paper focuses on the revival of private property and its limits in urban China. It explores the emergence of urban property markets; urban property-holding in relation to the complexity of urban governance; “minor property rights apartments” that form a de facto real estate market and cross over the urban-rural divide; the “grey areas” of blurring legal and administrative boundaries in modern China; and recent changes to the rural land system and the rural-urban divide. The conclusion flags the theme of the city as laboratory with regard to the blurring legal and governmental urban-rural distinction.
'From Subject to System: Some
unsystematic systems-theoretic thoughts on Race Equality and Human
Rights' in Michael King and Chris Thornhill, ed, Luhmann on Law
and Politics: Critical Appraisals and Applications (Hart, 2006)
55-74 (Spanish translation of the chapter to appear shortly)
Perhaps
more than any other social theorist in recent history,
Niklas Luhmann's work has aroused extreme, and often
antagonistic, responses. It has generated controversies
about its political implications, its resolute
anti-humanism and its ambitious critique of more
established definitions of society, social theory and
sociology. Now, however, a steadily growing number of
scholars working in many different disciplines have
begun to use aspects of Luhmann's sociology as an
important methodological stimulus and as a theoretical
framework for reorientating their studies. This
collection of essays includes critical and
reconstructive contributions by a number of
distinguished social theorists, political theorists,
legal scholars and empirical sociologists. Together,
they provide evidence of Luhmann's extensive and diverse
relevance to the issues facing contemporary society,
and, at the same time, they enhance our understanding of
the challenges posed by his theoretical paradigm to more
traditional conceptions of social theory.
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for publisher's site
“Theory in Practice in a Global Age: :
What Legal Theory Can and Cannot Do” was published in Law in the
Global Age and the Future of Korean Law (Korea University 2005)
and a revised version will appear in the Socio-Legal Review,
(National Law School of India at Bangalore) in 2006.
“Durkheim in China”, in Michael
Freeman, ed, Law and Sociology (OUP 2006) 107-118
Law
and Sociology contains a broad range of essays by scholars
interested in the interactions between law and sociology. In
common with earlier volumes in the Current Legal Issues
series, it seeks both a theoretical and methodological
focus.
The volume includes amongst other topics, a sociology of
jurisprudence, an examination of the social dynamics of
regulatory interactions, and a consideration of the place of
legal culture in the sociology of law.
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for publisher's site
“Legal fabrications and the case of
"Cultural Property” in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, ed, Law
Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social (CUP, 2004)
115-141
This
collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how
persons and things - the central elements of the social
- are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The
contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike,
focus on a set of specific institutional and
ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and
thought-provoking analogies emerge from this
intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For
example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status
of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the
questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its
treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright
and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia
suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite
unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory
science presents the production of legal artefacts in
new light. These studies are of particular relevance at
a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of
biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw
the line between persons and things.
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for publisher's site
“Include me Out” 29 Journal of Law
and Society (2002) 342-354
"Law, history of its relation to the social sciences" [for
International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences
(Oxford: Elsevier Science, 2001) ed. Neil Smelser and Paul Baltes]
"Modernising Justice Inside "UK plc : Mimesis, De-differentiation
and Colonisation" (in David Nelken and Jiri Priban, ed, Law’s New
Boundaries (Ashgate, 2001) 218-248
“Postmodernism: legal theory, legal
education and the future” (2000) 7 International Journal of the
Legal Professions 357-379
Tim Murphy
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for publisher's site