ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the interaction between Chinese and Western legal cultures as seen in colonial courts in Asia, as well as courts in Australia and the United States that conducted trials involving Chinese immigrants. Such interaction first occurred during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a time when the hierarchy of state law over customary, canon, and merchant law was only beginning to be fully enacted in European societies. As a result, the Western colonial governments of that era tended to avoid blanket top-down imposition of their legal systems, preferring instead various forms of experimentation in order to establish a legal system that might prove acceptable to both rulers and the ruled. Western states that had to deal with Chinese immigrants may not have been as tolerant or understanding, but also proved willing to exhibit a degree of flexibility. To a certain extent, then, the problem of administering justice in colonial or immigrant settings was less a question of tradition vs. modernity than one of the extent to which the modern nation-state would prove willing and able to tolerate non-Western ideas of judicial authority, with Lauren Benton observing that colonial legal history frequently featured a “contested historical movement from truly plural legal orders to state-dominated legal orders” (Benton 2002: 28; see also DuBois 2006).
