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Podcast: New Books in Law
Episode: Ke Li, "Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Description: In recent years the authors of a slew of books and articles have debated whether China is moving toward or away from the rule of law. Against this end-of-history approach to legal inquiry,Ā Ke LiĀ advocates for an approach that attends to the circumstances in which state actors select legal methodologies for the purposes of statecraft, and those in which they prefer nonlegal, extralegal and illegal ones. She demonstrates this approach inĀ Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary ChinaĀ (Stanford University Press, 2022), in which she offers a sophisticated āhistorically charged, culturalist perspectiveā of state legal practice in China...