Criminal Defense in China
The Politics of Lawyers at Work

This book studies the struggles for basic legal freedoms in the work and political mobilization of defense lawyers in China's criminal justice system.

Sida Liu (Author), Terence C. Halliday (Author)

9781316614846, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 14 November 2016

221 pages, 4 b/w illus. 5 tables
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

'Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday's Criminal Defense in China is a much needed, courageous, and accomplished book on criminal lawyering in China.' Ya-Wen Lei, American Journal of Sociology

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.

Subject Areas: Social law [LNT], Criminal procedure [LNFX], Criminal justice law [LNFB], Criminal law & procedure [LNF], Legal system: general [LNA]