Although land law or “real property law” is but one of several branches of what scholars commonly call “economic law,” or laws that regulate everyday economic activity, its history has drawn, over the past several decades, an unusually large amount of attention from legal theorists,...

This essay is an attempt to sort through the recent academic literature on the Supreme People's Court of China. It separates existing studies into three basic categories: those that study what the Court is allowed to do, those that study what it actually does, and those that study why it does...

The picture of Chinese law that many Western scholars and commentators portray is an increasingly bleak one: since the mid-2000s, China has been retreating from legal reform back into unchecked authoritarianism. This article argues that, much to the contrary, Chinese politics have in fact become...

Scholars have long debated how legal institutions influenced the economic development of societies and civilizations. This Article sheds new light on this debate by reexamining, from a legal perspective, a crucial segment of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century economic divergence between...

Up until the final four decades of the Qing Dynasty, fiscal extraction in imperial China was primarily a matter of taxing agricultural production, generally in the form of an annual property tax assessed on the basis of landholding, and collected in either grain or cash. All major dynasties...

This paper finds that the existence of strong kinship networks tends to limit state interference with private property use in rural China by protecting villagers against unwanted government land takings. It then distinguishes kinship networks from other kinds of social networks by showing that...

This article considers the applicability of "moral economy" theories to early modern land markets. It asks whether moral norms -- specifically, moral condemnation of land selling -- substantially impeded land alienation in several major early modern economies: China, England, and Japan....

This article argues that the rise of the modern state was a necessary condition for the rise of the business corporation. A typical business corporation pools together a large number of strangers to share ownership of residual claims in a single enterprise with guarantees of asset partitioning....

Do “cultural factors” substantively influence the creation and evolution of property institutions? For the past several decades, few legal scholars have answered affirmatively. Those inclined towards a law and economics methodology tend to see property institutions as the outcome of...