How May We Speak of Legal Common Sense

The Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University presents a talk with Bryna Goodman on trial transcripts and commentary from a controversial case that raised issues of jurisdiction and expertise

The new Chinese Republic repositioned people as citizens in a polity governed by law but could not achieve full judicial sovereignty. How did people understand the modernization of law and the legal process? Professor Goodman will discuss trial transcripts and commentary from a controversial case that raised issues of jurisdiction and expertise. In this case, extraterritorial jurisdiction should have resulted in a trial at the Mixed Court of the International Settlement. The kidnapping of the accused by Chinese police, however, placed the proceedings in Chinese court. Jurisdictional questions were particularly troublesome because of a contemporary movement to abolish the Mixed Court and reclaim Chinese legal sovereignty. The case involved new financial instruments and terminology that were beyond the grasp of most participants and beyond the specificity of the law. The show-cased trial was deeply flawed, but criticism of Chinese judges was awkward in the context of Chinese nationalism. Professor Goodman will analyze the contesting vernacular notions of sovereignty and justice.

Bryna  Goodman is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and professor of Chinese history at the University of Oregon, where she also directs the Asian Studies program. She is author of Native Place, City and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai (1995), and editor of Gender in Motion: Divisions of Labor and Cultural Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (2005) and Twentieth Century Colonialism and China: Localities, the Everyday, and the World (2012). Currently she is working on two projects, one on public culture in 1920s Shanghai and another on the early Shanghai stock exchanges and Chinese understandings of economics.

Dinner Option
We welcome participants who wish to attend both sessions of the New England China Seminar to join colleagues for a buffet dinner at 6:30-7:30 pm, in Room S153. The dinner cost is $15 per person ($10 for students). Due to space limitations, we will accept 30 reservations on a first come first serve basis. Advance reservation and payment is required. Please register by clicking here before noon on Thursday, September 6, 2012.