Criminal defense in China : the politics of lawyers at work / Sida Liu, Terence C. Halliday.

Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2016.

KNQ4630.D43 L585 2016

Ch.P 872 L74 2016

9781107162419 (hardback)
1107162416 (hardback)
9781316614846 (paperback)
1316614840 (paperback)

xix, 200 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

(OCoLC)951557383

"Illiberal political societies come with varieties of labels - absolute monarchies, military dictatorships, authoritarian or totalitarian politics, Big Man regimes, or dual states. Yet they share key features in common - little or no restraint on arbitrary executive power, most especially as it is exercised through military, police and security apparatuses; law that is distorted and circumscribed and ultimately ineffectual in its protections of individuals and organizations offensive to the ruling power; little space for voices to speak freely about their rulers, their qualities of life, or their circumstances in times and places and organizations of their own choosing; severely constricted notions of rights-bearing citizens beyond those granted or withdrawn by the rulers themselves; and precariousness of property ownership, among others"-- from Prologue, pages xi-xi.
"Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain futures." --Page i.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 183-191) and index.

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