LAW 6002 :
Chinese Law

China, with more than 1,000,000,000 people, has the world's largest market. In the increasingly global economy, American lawyers will find increasing need to be familiar with law in China. China has always been a non-legal culture, at least in the sense that we in the West understand law, until western notions of law began to penetrate China in the late nineteenth century. Since 1949, the Chinese on the mainland have engaged in two massive experiments relating to the role of law in a modernizing society, first, Mao's attempt to root out and eliminate law as a foreign transplant, and then, since Mao's death, a massive attempt to legalize a non-legal culture. The seminar will examine modern Chinese law relating to international trade and investment, in a setting of the broader themes of Chinese legal culture, as well as considering the Maoist and post-Maoist experiments as a means of exploring the role of law in modern society.