ABSTRACT
An ethical legal Orientalism attends to the conditions of legal subject formation: rather than positing the Chinese as simply lacking legal subjectivity, it allows for the possibility of differently constituted legal subjects. This chapter brings the mainstream of comparative law into conversation with other literatures: the study of non-Western law, the growing body of postcolonial theory, as well as recent work in legal theory. It traces a genealogy of certain Orientalist understandings of Chinese law and explores the broader questions of who gets to decide who has "law" and what the normative implications of its absence are. The chapter addresses the substantive arguments in the debate on law's existence in China. It attempts to take account of the context in which the study of Chinese law necessarily unfolds, and to understand the historicity of contemporary scholarship. The chapter directs the inquiry into a certain historiographic tradition it calls "legal Orientalism".
