The Futility of Law and Development

China and the Dangers of Exporting American Law

Bibliographic Data

ID19982824
AuthorsJedidiah Joseph Kroncke
Year2016
Pages358
Publication date2016-01-21
Open AccessNo
TypeBOOK
VenueThe futility of law and development (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190233525.001.0001
OpenAlexW4252409254
Open LibraryOL27197665M
ISBN9780190233525
LanguageEN
Citations received10

This book uses the Sino-American relationship to trace the decline of American legal cosmopolitanism from the Revolutionary era until today. Moving ever further away from the Founders' openness to learning from Chinese law, over two centuries the Sino-American relationship reflected and shaped this decline–transformed by ideas from the American missionary movement during the late 19th century. The missionary ethos presented American legal internationalism as acolonial and humanitarian, and this view infused the new professional ideology of American law at the turn of the 20th century. Missionaries presented the Chinese Republic of 1911 as ready to accept Americanization, an idea that was disseminated broadly in American popular culture and penetrated the institutions of American internationalism. After World War II, the missionary ethos became progressively secularized, fueling claims that American law was uniquely expressive of American values and could at as a universal catalyst for foreign legal development. This shift transformed legal comparativists from central figures in American domestic legal reform into unsuccessful foreign legal reformers, what today is commonly called "law and development." The centrality of Sino-American relations in these developments was obscured in 1949 after the victory of the Chinese Communist Party. In the midst of the Cold War, American anti-cosmopolitanism was normalized as patriotic legal humanitarianism, a process that left American legal culture stultified by an abandonment of comparative legal practice and America's foreign policy grounded in warped understandings of foreign legal developments—a glaring liability in the competitive dynamics of a multi-polar 21st century

Law and economics · Political science · Sociology · Human Rights and Development · Law · American influences · American Technical assistance · china · Chinese influences · Diplomatic relations · foreign relations · Law reform · Technical assistance, american · united states

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