For all the attention paid to the Founder Fathers in contemporary American debates, it has almost been wholly forgotten how deeply they embraced an ambitious and intellectually profound valuation of foreign legal experience. Jedidiah Kroncke uses the Founders' serious engagement with, and often admiration for, Chinese law in the Revolutionary era to begin his history of how America lost this Founding commitment to legal cosmopolitanism and developed a contemporary legal culture both parochial in its resistance to engaging foreign legal experience and universalist in its messianic desire to export American law abroad. Kroncke reveals how the under-appreciated, but central role of Sino-American relations in this decline over two centuries, significantly reshaped in the early 20th century as American lawyer-missionaries helped inspire the first modern projects of American humanitarian internationalism through legal development. Often forgotten today after the rise of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the Sino-American relationship in the early 20th century was a key crucible for articulating this vision as Americans first imagined waves of Americanization abroad in the wake of China's 1911 Republican revolution. Drawing in historical threads from religious, legal and foreign policy work, the book demonstrates how American comparative law ultimately became a marginalized practice in this process. The marginalization belies its central place in earlier eras of American political and legal reform. In doing so, the book reveals how the cosmopolitan dynamism so prevalent at the Founding is a lost virtue that today comprises a serious challenge to American legal culture and its capacity for legal innovation in the face of an increasingly competitive and multi-polar 21st century. Once again, America's relationship with China presents a critical opportunity to recapture this lost virtue and stimulate the searching cosmopolitanism that helped forge the original foundations of American democracy.

About the Author
Associate Professor of Law, The University of Hong Kong

Reviews
[Futility] is a meticulously documented and ethnographically inspired history of Chinese and American foreign relations. Why do American lawyers export American legal norms, particularly to places with their own rich legal traditions? The answer is as unexpected as it is revelatory...American foreign relations are built upon the meeting of two unexpected forces and disciplines: law and religion...The book is essential reading for comparative legal historians, rule-of-law practitioners, and those who study the impact of law in Sino-American relations. * Mark Massoud, Asian Journal of Law and Society *
In this exceptionally sweeping and ambitious book, Jed Kroncke provides a richly researched treatment of the long and eventful engagement of the United States with China and its legal system. The Futility of Law and Development is a historical lamentation for the supposed decline and fall of American legal "comparativism", defined here as a broad-mindedness about and openness to foreign legal ideas and practices. A short review cannot do justice to the analytical subtlety and empirical depth of Kroncke's eight chapters and two exemplary (in both senses of the word) case studies. * Rande Kostal, Law and History Review *
It is hard to imagine that any attempt would do justice to the richness of the historical narrative and the complexity of Kroncke's analysis...[he] moves away from the common place criticism that law and development reforms do not work, to ask what law and development scholars may be losing by engaging in its present-day universalism; he concludes that not only are time and money being wasted in failed attempts to export American law abroad, but that the law and development discourse has largely closed the intellectual space for enriching comparative law scholarship...Kroncke provides a passionate call for a return to fruitful comparative exercises, where we all could learn from our differences. * Mariana Prado, Asian Journal of International Law *
The particular strength of [Kronche's] historical presentation lies in its skillful combination of biographical elements with broader historical dynamics...the Futility of Law and Development is a worthwhile read for all who deal with the ambivalent role of law and legal proselytizing in the nineteenth century and beyond. * Stefan Kroll, Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History *
Kroncke...provides an extensively researched and well-argued analysis of the misperceptions and missteps associated with US attempts to promote the introduction of a legal system in China based on the US model...Chapters addressing the impact of perceptions regarding the "laws of China" on efforts to understand the evolution of Chinese legal norms - as well as the two case studies involving Frank Goodnow and Roscoe Pound - are particularly insightful in the manner in which they address the missionary zeal of US legal reformers. Kroncke's concluding analysis of US legal reform efforts in China in the post-Maoist period within the context of a messianic past provides important insights. * C.W. Herrick, CHOICE *
[Futility] represents a criticism of the traditional methods and approaches of law and development...demonstrating how the fields universalist tendencies and aspirations originated historically through the proselytizing of Protestant missionaries who viewed American law as intertwined with American Christianity...Kroncke's final wish is that one day American law can recover the legal cosmopolitanism of its founding and return to cultivating a more authentic practice of comparative law. * Giorgio Mocavini, Rivista Trimestrale di Diritto Pubblico *
Athough The Futility of Law and Development is primarily a historical work, its contemporary significance is clear. It is a crucial time to reflect on the rocky record of America's engagement with China's legal system. U.S.-China relations stand at a critical juncture with simultaneous substantial interdependence and palpable tension. Members of the U.S. government, nongovernmental organizations, and academia whose work involves China's legal system would be wise to take pause and put The Futility of Law and Development on their bedside tables. * Margaret K. Lewis, Seton Hall University, China Review International *



Book Information
ISBN 9780190233525
Author Jedidiah J. Kroncke
Format Hardback
Page Count 374
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 635g
Dimensions(mm) 155mm * 236mm * 33mm