(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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“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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“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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“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
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here for publisher's site