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October 23 @ 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm CDT

Speaker Series: Ke Li

Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
The Limits of Authoritarian Legality: The Rise and Fall of Legal Workers in Reform-Era China
Hybrid: Virtual/In-Person (ABF Offices, 750 N Lake Shore Drive, 4th Floor Chicago, IL)
Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, this talk presents a case study of legal workers in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Empirically, it marks the key moments in the PRC’s development of a legal services industry during the reform era. It does so by tracing how a particular group of law practitioners, known as basic-level legal workers, rose to prominence in the socialist era and then fell from favor in the new millennium. The fact that the PRC’s top decision-makers have struggled to transform the group of practitioners and that they have mishandled attempts to harness a burgeoning services industry testifies to the limits of authoritarian regimes—and especially the challenges in instrumentalizing law, legal professions, and judicial institutions. Theoretically speaking, this case study foregrounds an understudied theme in the literature. True, legality has become an integral part of autocrats’ ruling methodologies in many parts of the world. Their endeavors to deploy legal techniques and personnel to resolve emerging problems in ruling, however, do not always deliver. Thus, it is crucial for researchers to heed—and explicate—when and why autocrats do not always get what they want.

 

To read the related paper for Dr. Li’s presentation, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón.

To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org. 

Ke Li (she/her) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the John Jay College of the City University of New York. Her research focuses on law and society, knowledge practices, and gender politics in contemporary China. In a decade or so, she has had articles published in the Law & Society Review, Law & Policy, and Sociological Forum. Her book, Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022.  

Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic data, Marriage Unbound shows how women’s legal mobilization and rights contention can forge new ground for our understanding of law and politics, as well as power and inequality, in an authoritarian context. In 2023, this book received several awards, including Herbert Jacob Book Prize for the best book on law and society and Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics. 

In recent years, she has branched out into new research areas. In one project, she examines LGBTQ activism and impact litigation in Chinese society; and, in a related project, studies how state- and society-sponsored knowledge moves come to shape judicial decision-making, respectively. Together, these two inquiries, she hopes, will allow her to connect several adjacent research areas: law and society, the sociology of knowledge, and science and technology studies.