Society, Empire, and the Law in East Asia, c. 1700-1950s

This course examines dynamic interactions between law and society in China, Japan, and Korea from 1700 through 1950s. The course deals with law as a realm of high politics especially in an age of nineteenth-century imperialism and colonialism, but it focuses on family and communal relations, gender and sexuality, and crime and punishment in relations to law because these topics can highlight not only theoretical discussions of law in domestic and international politics but also down-to-earth practices of law and societal implications that followed them. To consider the historically rich experiences of law in East Asian societies, we engage with a body of scholarly works on these topics, actual codes and cases, and novels and films. The aim of the course is to help us to understand how significantly East Asia has had its own local experiences of law that were simultaneously entangled with Western legal thoughts and practices in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All readings are available in English.