Criminal Defense in China The Politics of Lawyers at Work

Criminal Defense in China studies empirically the everyday work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China. It builds upon 329 interviews across China, and other social science methods, to investigate and analyze the interweaving of politics and practice in five segments of the practicing criminal defense bar in China from 2005 to 2015. This book is the first to examine everyday criminal defense work in China as a political project. The authors engage extensive scholarship on lawyers and political liberalism across the world, from seventeenth-century Europe to late twentieth-century Korea and Taiwan, drawing on theoretical propositions from this body of theory to examine the strategies and constraints of lawyer mobilization in China. The book brings a fresh perspective through its focus on everyday work and ordinary lawyering in an authoritarian context and raises searching questions about law and lawyers, politics and society, in China's uncertain future.

1. The politics of criminal defense lawyers; 2. Recursivity of criminal procedure reforms; 3. Difficulties and danger in lawyers' workplaces; 4. Survival strategies and political values; 5. The courage of notable activists; 6. The trial of Li Zhuang; 7. Lawyer activism through online networking; 8. Between reform and repression.

Sida Liu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Faculty Fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2016–17. He received his LLB from Peking University Law School and his PhD in sociology from the University of Chicago. He has written widely on Chinese law, sociolegal theory, and general social theory, including two books (in Chinese) on the legal profession in China.
Terence C. Halliday is Co-Director of the Center on Law and Globalization, Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and Honorary Professor at the Australian National University, Canberra. He has written widely on global law-making, professions and national law reforms around the world, including corporate bankruptcy and criminal procedure law reforms in China. He has presented his China research in North America, Europe, Australia, and East Asia, and to the Council on Foreign Relations, New York. He is widely cited in media reports on China, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera and Buzzfeed.