Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

Contents of Harvard Law Review: Volume 130, Number 8 - June 2017 include: * Article, "The Judicial Presumption of Police Expertise," by Anna Lvovsky * Essay, "The Debate That Never Was," by Nicos Stavropoulos * Essay, "Hart's Posthumous Reply," by Ronald Dworkin * Book Review, "Cooperative and Uncooperative Foreign Affairs Federalism," by Jean Galbraith * Note, "Rethinking Actual Causation in Tort Law" * Note, "The Justiciability of Servicemember Suits" * Note, "The Substantive Waiver Doctrine in Employment Arbitration Law" Furthermore, student commentary analyzes Recent Cases on: requiring proof of administrative feasibility to satisfy class action Rule 23; whether prison gerrymandering violates the Equal Protection Clause; justiciability of suit against the government for military sexual assaults; whether criminal procedure requires retroactive application of Hurst v. Florida to pre-Ring cases; whether statutory interpretation's rule of lenity requires fixing cocaine possession penalties by total drug weight; and, in international law, the UN's Security Council asserting Israel's settlement activities to be illegal. Finally, the issue includes several summaries of Recent Publications. The Harvard Law Review is offered in a quality digital edition, featuring active Contents, linked footnotes, active URLs, legible tables, and proper ebook and Bluebook formatting. The Review is a student-run organization whose primary purpose is to publish a journal of legal scholarship. It comes out monthly from November through June and has roughly 2300 pages per volume. Student editors make all editorial and organizational decisions. This is the final issue of academic year 2016-2017.

Radical ideas for changing the justice system, rooted in the real-life experiences of those in overpoliced communities, from the acclaimed former federal prosecutor and author of Chokehold Paul Butler was an ambitious federal prosecutor, a Harvard Law grad who gave up his corporate law salary to fight the good fight—until one day he was arrested on the street and charged with a crime he didn't commit. In a book Harvard Law professor Charles Ogletree calls “a must-read,” Butler looks at places where ordinary citizens meet the justice system—as jurors, witnesses, and in encounters with the police—and explores what “doing the right thing” means in a corrupt system. No matter how powerless those caught up in the web of the law may feel, there is a chance to regain agency, argues Butler. Through groundbreaking and sometimes controversial methods—jury nullification (voting “not guilty” in drug cases as a form of protest), just saying “no” when the police request your permission to search, and refusing to work inside the system as a snitch or a prosecutor—ordinary people can tip the system towards actual justice. Let’s Get Free is an evocative, compelling look at the steps we can collectively take to reform our broken system.