A fresh perspective on socialist law as practiced in China and Vietnam, two major socialist states.

Although the adoption of market reforms has been a key factor leading to China’s recent economic growth, China continues to be governed by a communist party and has a socialist-influenced legal system. Vietnam, starting later, also with a socialist-influenced legal system, has followed a similar reform path, and other countries too are now looking towards China and Vietnam as models for development. This book provides a comprehensive, comparative assessment of legal developments in China and Vietnam, examining similarities and differences, and raising important questions such as: Is there a distinctive Chinese model, and/or a more general East Asian Model? If so, can it be flexibly applied to social and economic conditions in different countries? If it cannot be applied to a culturally and politically similar country like Vietnam, is the model transportable elsewhere in the world? Combining ‘micro’ or interpretive methods with ‘macro’ or structural traditions, the book provides a nuanced account of legal reforms in China and Vietnam, highlighting the factors likely to promote, change or resist the spread of the Chinese model.

Since China's reform and opening up started in 1978 and Vietnam's Doi Moi reforms were initiated in 1986, these two East Asian economies have adopted capitalistic models of development while retaining and reforming their socialist legal systems along the way. Tracking the trajectory of socialist laws and their legacy, this book offers a unique comparison of laws and institutional designs in China and Vietnam. Leading scholars from China, Vietnam, Australia and the United States analyze the history, development and impact of socialist law reforms in these two continuing socialist states. Readers are offered a varied insight into the complex quality and unique features of socialist law and why it should be taken seriously. This is a fresh theoretical approach to, and internal critique of, socialist laws which demonstrates how socialist law in China and Vietnam may shape the future of global legal development among developing countries.

As a child, Inga Markovits dreamt of stealing and reading every letter contained in a mailbox at a busy intersection of her town in order to learn what life is all about. When, decades later, working as a legal historian, she tracked down the almost complete archive of a former East German trial court, she knew that she had finally found her mailbox. Combining her work in this extraordinary archive with interviews of former plaintiffs and defendants, judges and prosecutors, government and party functionaries, and Stasi collaborators, all in the little town she calls "Lüritz," Markovits has written a remarkable grassroots history of a legal system that set out with the utopian hopes of a few and ended in the anger and disappointment of the many. This is a story of ordinary men and women who experienced Socialist law firsthand--people who applied and used the law, trusted and resented it, manipulated and broke it, and feared and opposed it, but who all dealt with it in ways that help us understand what it meant to be a citizen in a twentieth-century Socialist state, what "Socialist justice" aimed to do, and how, in the end, it failed. Brimming with human stories of obedience and resistance, endurance and cunning, and cruelty and grief, Justice in Lüritz is ultimately a book about much more than the law, or Socialism, or East Germany.

This book is a unique analysis of the struggle to build a rule of law in one of the world's most dynamic and vibrant nations - a socialist state that is seeking to build a market economy while struggling to pursue an ethos of social equality and opportunity. It addresses constitutional change, the assertion of constitutional claims by citizens, the formation of a strong civil society and non-profit sector, the emergence of economic law and the battles over who is benefited by the economic regulation, labor law and the protection of migrant and export labor, the rise of lawyers and public interest law, and other key topics. Alongside other countries, comparisons are made to parallel developments in another transforming socialist state, the People's Republic of China.

Reconstructs existing comparative law scholarship into a coherent analytic framework so as to both fend off current charges of theoretical arbitrariness and guide future work.

"The book, using a small group of left-wing student activists as a prism, explores the complex politics that underpinned the making of nation-states in Singapore and Malaysia after World War Two. While most works have viewed the period in terms of political contestation groups, the book demonstrates how it is better understood as involving a shared modernist project framed by British-planned decolonization. This pursuit of nationalist modernity was characterized by an optimism to replace the colonial system with a new state and mobilize the people into a new relationship with the state, according them new responsibilities as well as new rights. This book, based on student writings, official documents and oral history interviews, brings to life various modernist strands - liberal-democratic, ethnic-communal, and Fabian and Marxist socialist - seeking to determine the form of post-colonial Malaya. It uncovers a hitherto little-seen world where the meanings of loud slogans were fluid, vague and deeply contested. This world also comprised as much convergence between the groups as conflict, including collaboration between the Socialist Club and other political and student groups which were once its rivals, while its main ally eventually became its nemesis"--Publisher's description.