How did American schoolchildren, French philosophers, Russian Sinologists, Dutch merchants, and British lawyers imagine China and Chinese law? What happened when agents of presumably dominant Western empires had to endure the humiliations and anxieties of maintaining a profitable but precarious relationship with China? In Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, Li Chen provides a richly textured analysis of these related issues and their intersection with law, culture, and politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Using a wide array of sources, Chen's study focuses on the power dynamics of Sino-Western relations during the formative century before the First Opium War (1839-1842). He highlights the centrality of law to modern imperial ideology and politics and brings new insight to the origins of comparative Chinese law in the West, the First Opium War, and foreign extraterritoriality in China. The shifting balance of economic and political power formed and transformed knowledge of China and Chinese law in different contact zones. Chen argues that recovering the variegated and contradictory roles of Chinese law in Western "modernization" helps provincialize the subsequent Euro-Americentric discourse of global modernity.
Chen draws attention to important yet underanalyzed sites in which imperial sovereignty, national identity, cultural tradition, or international law and order were defined and restructured. His valuable case studies show how constructed differences between societies were hardened into cultural or racial boundaries and then politicized to rationalize international conflicts and hierarchy.

本书关注一个“非法”的“社会事实”：在充满盗版和抄袭的环境下，网络时代的文学生产爆发出前所未有的生命力，正日益成为娱乐文化生产的总源头，进而影响公共想象和意识形态的形成。如何理解这种法律视野中的“悖谬”，以及悖谬背后传统的法律想象与新技术生产之间的张力？本书通过对网络文学发展的整个进程的梳理，探究了著作权之于个人自由和社会繁荣的影响，法律与社会运动背后的焦虑，以及制度讨论的社会建构性意义。

这本书是一项关于中国法律职业的大型实证研究，作者秉承社会学芝加哥学派的生态分析传统，对我国法律服务市场各个领域的竞争与规范问题进行了全面的社会科学分析。基于作者在2004-2007年间对中国12个省份的250余位法律执业者和国家官员的深入访谈、对中国律师网互动社区的三年参与观察以及大量历史材料收集工作，书中研究表明，中国法律服务市场的社会结构是高度割据的，多个法律职业群体占据了这一市场的各个角落，律师业与其他职业之间的管辖权界限十分模糊，而管理律师业的司法行政机关，在同样高度割据的国家管理体系中也处于相对弱势的地位，因此律师在法律服务市场上的地位就显得极不稳固。为了解释这一割据现象，作者在书中提出了一个关于定界与交换的空间社会学理论，并将其应用在中国法律服务市场的五个空间领域：边疆（农村法律服务）、战场（城市基层法律服务）、高端（涉外法律服务）、后院（企业与政府法律服务）、雷区（刑事法律服务）。这不仅是一本法律社会学的学术著作，而且是一次对于我国法律职业发展状况的深度透视，具有重要的理论和实践意义，值得法学、社会学、政治学及其他相关学科背景的学者、学生和实务人员参考。