Benjamin L Liebman
Biographic Data
| ID | 342905 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Benjamin L Liebman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Benjamin L |
| FAMILY NAME | Liebman |
| SIGNATURE | LIEBMAN B L |
| AFFILIATIONS | School of Law, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3416-6896 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 35 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Comparative authoritarian law
In recent years, comparative constitutional lawyers have turned their attention to the study of democratic backsliding. However, such scholarship is yet to draw on the now extensive literature on traditional authoritarian systems. The bifurcation of regime type that has structured comparative legal research for decades—for comparative constitutional lawyers and for scholars of specific authoritarian regions—is now under strain. With the global ri…
Redefining Law in China
Although there is a growing body of literature on the role of law under authoritarian regimes, scholars have paid little attention to authoritarian legal ideology or conceptions of legality in contemporary authoritarian states. This Article presents the first in-depth study of the Chinese Communist Party’s recent novel attempt to introduce and implement an official legal ideology under the banner of “Xi Jinping’s Thought on the Rule of Law,” one …
Addressing Missingness in Serialized Bureaucratic Data
Courts around the world are putting their data online, making information about caseloads, parties, and decisions available to the public. Yet, this data is far from complete, and often only reflects a portion of courts' dockets. We offer and validate a set of tools for leveraging serialized bureaucratic data from courts to estimate the proportion of cases available to the public and the time courts take to make decisions. Using data from more th…
Contesting and Controlling Abortion in China's Courts
The decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has brought renewed global attention to how legal systems protect and restrict women’s reproductive autonomy. Central themes have included how the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States coincides with the judiciary’s embrace of a broader “jurisprudence of masculinity” and the relationship between abortion restrictions and authoritarianism…
Performing Legality
Since 2015, Chinese government leaders have been required by law to appear in court when citizens sue their unit or to designate an employee to take their place. We frame this policy as a demand on leaders to “perform legality,” sacrificing their time to demonstrate how seriously the government takes legal proceedings. Drawing on an original dataset of 127,529 administrative lawsuits decided between 2015 and 2018, we investigate how often governm…
Liability Beyond Law
Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel "fair and just" in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) par…
Closing Open Government
How and when do opportunities for political participation through courts change under authoritarianism? Although China is better known for tight political control than for political expression, the 2008 Open Government Information (OGI) regulation ushered in a surge of political-legal activism. We draw on an original dataset of 57,095 OGI lawsuits, supplemented by interview data and government documents, to show how a feedback loop between judges…
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions
Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outlin…
Legal Reform
In the 1980s and 1990s, China devoted extensive resources to constructing a legal system, in part in the belief that legal institutions would enhance both stability and regime legitimacy. Why, then, did China's leadership retreat from using law when faced with perceived increases in protests, citizen complaints, and social discontent in the 2000s? This law-stability paradox suggests that party-state leaders do not trust legal institutions to play…
Chinese Justice
This volume analyzes whether China's thirty years of legal reform have taken root in Chinese society by examining how ordinary citizens are using the legal system in contemporary China. It is an interdisciplinary look at law in action and at legal institutions from the bottom up, that is, beginning with those at the ground level that are using and working in the legal system. It explores the emergent Chinese conception of justice - one that seeks…
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions
Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outlin…
Legal Reform
In the 1980s and 1990s, China devoted extensive resources to constructing a legal system, in part in the belief that legal institutions would enhance both stability and regime legitimacy. Why, then, did China's leadership retreat from using law when faced with perceived increases in protests, citizen complaints, and social discontent in the 2000s? This law-stability paradox suggests that party-state leaders do not trust legal institutions to play…
Closing Open Government
How and when do opportunities for political participation through courts change under authoritarianism? Although China is better known for tight political control than for political expression, the 2008 Open Government Information (OGI) regulation ushered in a surge of political-legal activism. We draw on an original dataset of 57,095 OGI lawsuits, supplemented by interview data and government documents, to show how a feedback loop between judges…
Chinese Justice
This volume analyzes whether China's thirty years of legal reform have taken root in Chinese society by examining how ordinary citizens are using the legal system in contemporary China. It is an interdisciplinary look at law in action and at legal institutions from the bottom up, that is, beginning with those at the ground level that are using and working in the legal system. It explores the emergent Chinese conception of justice - one that seeks…
Legal Reform
In the 1980s and 1990s, China devoted extensive resources to constructing a legal system, in part in the belief that legal institutions would enhance both stability and regime legitimacy. Why, then, did China's leadership retreat from using law when faced with perceived increases in protests, citizen complaints, and social discontent in the 2000s? This law-stability paradox suggests that party-state leaders do not trust legal institutions to play…
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions
Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outlin…
Closing Open Government
How and when do opportunities for political participation through courts change under authoritarianism? Although China is better known for tight political control than for political expression, the 2008 Open Government Information (OGI) regulation ushered in a surge of political-legal activism. We draw on an original dataset of 57,095 OGI lawsuits, supplemented by interview data and government documents, to show how a feedback loop between judges…
Contesting and Controlling Abortion in China's Courts
The decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has brought renewed global attention to how legal systems protect and restrict women’s reproductive autonomy. Central themes have included how the rollback of reproductive rights in the United States coincides with the judiciary’s embrace of a broader “jurisprudence of masculinity” and the relationship between abortion restrictions and authoritarianism…
Performing Legality
Since 2015, Chinese government leaders have been required by law to appear in court when citizens sue their unit or to designate an employee to take their place. We frame this policy as a demand on leaders to “perform legality,” sacrificing their time to demonstrate how seriously the government takes legal proceedings. Drawing on an original dataset of 127,529 administrative lawsuits decided between 2015 and 2018, we investigate how often governm…
Liability Beyond Law
Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel "fair and just" in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) par…
Comparative authoritarian law
In recent years, comparative constitutional lawyers have turned their attention to the study of democratic backsliding. However, such scholarship is yet to draw on the now extensive literature on traditional authoritarian systems. The bifurcation of regime type that has structured comparative legal research for decades—for comparative constitutional lawyers and for scholars of specific authoritarian regions—is now under strain. With the global ri…
Redefining Law in China
Although there is a growing body of literature on the role of law under authoritarian regimes, scholars have paid little attention to authoritarian legal ideology or conceptions of legality in contemporary authoritarian states. This Article presents the first in-depth study of the Chinese Communist Party’s recent novel attempt to introduce and implement an official legal ideology under the banner of “Xi Jinping’s Thought on the Rule of Law,” one …
Addressing Missingness in Serialized Bureaucratic Data
Courts around the world are putting their data online, making information about caseloads, parties, and decisions available to the public. Yet, this data is far from complete, and often only reflects a portion of courts' dockets. We offer and validate a set of tools for leveraging serialized bureaucratic data from courts to estimate the proportion of cases available to the public and the time courts take to make decisions. Using data from more th…
Political science (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Law (4 works) · Law and economics (4 works) · Politics (4 works) · Authoritarianism (3 works) · China (3 works) · Law in Society and Culture (3 works)