A Response to Professor Tan's Review of Legal Orientalism

Abstract

This piece is a response to Professor Carol Tan’s “How a ‘Lawless’ China Made Modern America: An Epic Told in Orientalism,” 128 Harvard Law Review 1677 (2015). In her extensive review article, Tan provides a capacious analysis of my book “Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law” (Harvard University Press 2013). Beyond synthesizing my key arguments and providing an analytic map of the book’s main contentions, she enhances them by supplying a great deal of supplemental historical information. Rather than commenting on the specifics of Tan’s detailed review, this response expands upon and clarifies a few of the main arguments with which Tan is most engaged. Insofar as Tan’s review introduces historical background not referenced in my analysis, considering such additional material allows this response to focus on some matters that I could not address within the scope of the book.