Qingli: A Theoretical Outline of Transformative Justice

Fudan University's Daniel Lin will talk on Chinese law at UC Berkeley.

Qingli (perhaps best translated “commonsense”) is a distinctive phenomenon in Chinese law. Refuting past research that equated qingli with equity in the common law tradition, this paper argues that, at a deeper level, qingli represents a conception of transformative justice, in the sense that it can play a role in transforming and making flexible legal rules, principles, or texts, when hardship occurs during their rigid application.