Book Review: Law, Obligation, Community
| Author | Sean Coyle |
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0964663920975104 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
prosecutors and judges spotlight a ‘game playing’ relationship between them, charac-
terised by not only mutual cooperation but also delicate trade-offs and negotiations. She
also suggests that the physical proximity of the offices of the procuratorate and the court
facilitates the maintenance of a mutually dependent relationship between the two judicial
institutions. By contrast, most defence lawyers play merely a passive role in criminal
trials and ‘are also aware of the symbolic nature of trials’ (p. 215). As a result of this
unbalanced power relationship among the prosecutor, the judge, and the defence lawyer,
Chinese criminal trials are dominated by the prosecution’s case dossier and a judicial
culture of ‘managerialism’ (p. 198).
The Construction of Guilt in China was published at a critical time for sociolegal
studies in China. Since the mid-2010s, access for fieldwork in the Chinese legal system
has become increasingly difficult for political and practical reasons. Many researchers,
in China and elsewhere, began to pivot their work by focusing on ‘big data’ or other
quantitative methods rather than ethnography or in-depth interviews. This is a worrying
trend. Rigorous sociolegal research often requires first-hand experience on the hidden
parts of law, not just those visible parts on public display. In this context, Mou’s book
sets an outstanding example of how to conduct fieldwork in one of the most secretive
sites of Chinese criminal justice and present empirical findings in an organised, discern-
ing, and unpretentious manner. The magic of this book lies in the details.
SIDA LIU
University of Toronto, Canada
ORCID iD
Sida Liu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5147-0024
D MATTHEWS AND S VEITCH (eds), Law, Obligation, Community. Abingdon: Routledge, 2018, pp.
xviiiþ271 inc. index, ISBN 978-1-138-30040-8, 86GBP (hbk).
Of the three concepts highlighted by this volume’s title, the focus of the majority of its
contributors is upon the middle term, obligation. Both the contributors and the reader of
the volume bring to bear upon this subject their particular philosophical lenses, each of
which illuminates certain dimensions of the issue. This reviewer (a Thomist natural law
theorist) found some points of commonality with the largely ‘critical’ standpoint adopted
throughout the volume (some mention Aquinas as I will discuss below); but even where
there were evident differences in starting point and method, the contributions to the
volume were never less than interesting, rigorous and thought-provoking. Instead of
trying to summarise the book, let me pick out a few threads.
Readers may wonder why the concept of a ‘right’ does not appear in the volume’s
title, given its strong associations with obligation. But a central strand of thinking
running through many of the contributions to the volume is that the concept of ‘obliga-
tion’ is logically prior to, rather than a mere correlative of, ‘right’. Such a position is not,
494 Social & Legal Studies 30(3)
To continue reading
Request your trial