Muslim Mandarins in Chinese Courts: Dispute Resolution,Islamic Law,and the Secular State in Northwest China

Many sociolegal studies have investigated the relationship between state law and informal law, examining alternative dispute resolution and popular justice as intersections between such types of law. However, such questions have received little attention in East Asian authoritarian states. I use the case of dispute resolution among Chinese Muslim minorities (the Hui) to reexamine the relationship between state law and Islamic law. Based on nineteen months of fieldwork in Northwest China, I argue that the Hui case shows codependence between the types of law. Law is deeply embedded in social relationships between the Hui and the party‐state. An analysis of personalistic relationships shows the ways in which religious and secular authorities access each other, transforming each other's law to augment their own legitimacy, but not without the potential for violence. The China case illuminates dynamics between Muslim communities and states that are prevalent elsewhere in the post‐9/11 period.     

The enterprise and industrial composition of new British portfolio foreign investment, 1865–1914

Source Material on the South African Economy 1860–1970 by H. Hobart Houghton and J. Dagut. Vol. 1, 1972, pp. 369; Vol. II, 1972, pp. 247; Vol. III, 1973, pp. 263. Cape Town: Oxford University Press.     

What Does It Mean to Control Migration? Soviet Mobility Policies in Comparative Perspective

The migration policies of the former Soviet Union (or USSR) included a virtual abolition of emigration and immigration, an effective ban on private travel abroad, and pervasive bureaucratic controls on internal migration. This article outlines this Soviet package of migration controls and assesses its historical and international distinctiveness through comparison with a liberal state, the United States, and an authoritarian capitalist state, Apartheid South Africa. Soviet limitations on external migration were more restrictive than those of contemporary capitalist states, and Soviet regulation of internal migration was unusual in its direct bureaucratic supervision of the individual. However, Soviet policy did not aim at the suppression of internal migration, but at its complete regularization. The ultimate goal was “regime adherence”: the full integration of the citizen into the Soviet political order. In contrast to the USSR, migration in the contemporary world is marked by “irregularization”: policies that lead to the proliferation of insecure and unauthorized migration.     

Shining Some Light Back on the Dark Ages: New York State's Early Environmental Law and Its Implications for Today's Environmental Insurance Coverage Disputes

While many environmental practitioners consider the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in the 1970s and the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act in the 1980s as the dawn of modern environmental law, New York State has a robust body of antipollution law that predates those federal statutes by decades. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York State statutes, embracing well-established common law principles, contained limitations on the disposal of harmful industrial waste into the waters of the state. The New York State Public Health Law required permits for certain discharges of industrial waste, and the common law provided injunctions and monetary damages for those injured by environmental pollution. This body of law should not be overlooked during coverage disputes over historical environmental contamination because it documents an awareness by the state legislature of the impact of pollution on both surface and groundwaters of the state, and because it demonstrates that harmful unpermitted discharges were prohibited by law since the beginning of the twentieth century.     

Michael Moore on Torture,Morality, and Law

During the past few decades, Michael Moore has written incisively on an array of matters concerning the relationships between law and morality. While reflecting on those relationships, he has plumbed the nature of morality itself in impressive depth. Among the topics which he has addressed, the problem of torture has been prominent and controversial. It is a problem, moreover, that has led to some of his most searching enquiries into the character of moral obligations. In the present essay I take issue not only with many of Moore's conclusions about torture, but also with some of his more far‐reaching claims about the domain of morality.