The East Asian Legal Studies Center is sponsoring Matthew S. Erie, Ph.D., J.D. to present on his working paper, "Qadi Justice in Chinese Courts: The Bureaucratization of Islamic Law in the People's Republic of China." The lecture will take place in Lubar Commons (Room 7200, Law Building) on Oct. 21 at noon.
About the lecture: Recent scholarship has directed an orientalist critique toward Max Weber’ approach to the study of non-Western legal systems, namely, Islamic and Chinese law. Whereas Weber’s substantive analysis mischaracterized these legal systems, his verstehen methodology and core concepts for his approach – namely, bureaucracy, charisma, and legitimacy – shed light on the study of Muslim minorities in secular states. Ethnographic data collected from 2009 to 2012 in northwestern China on the Party-State’s bureaucratization of Chinese Muslim clergy demonstrates the different modes by which the Party-State routinizes charisma and uses Islamic authority to legitimize its rule. An ethnographic critique of Weber’s analysis may lead to an accommodation between classical theory and contemporary empirical approaches.
About the speaker: Matthew S. Erie is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies and Visiting Scholar at the Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. Prior to his appointments, he practiced law in Beijing and New York City. His research examines the historical and contemporary relationship between Islam and China, with specific foci on law, property, ritual, and ethnicity. His book, tentatively entitled, The Prophet and the Party: Islam, Shari'a, and China, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from Cornell University, a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a LL.M. from Tsinghua University School of Law.
For more about Matthew S. Erie, visit his webpage.
If you have any questions about the event, please contact Erica Zurawski.
Submitted by EALSC News on October 9, 2013
This article appears in the categories: EALSC
