China's Long March toward Rule of Law

Rating:
Summary: A Must Read for Any China Watcher
Review: I am fortunate enough to have been a student of Professor Peerenboom's at the UCLA School of Law where he practically teaches the contents of this book in his Comparative Law: China course.

While I'm not the biggest fan of his thin/thick rule of law approach, or of his categorization of China's possible rule of law systems into four groups, plus a 'Rule by Law' alternative, this theoretical framework largely succeeds in introducing the reader to China's somewhat byzantine legal system, and the enormous number of problems China's legal reformers face in its overhaul.

Professor Peerenboom is at his best when he takes the reader through the different elements that compose the Chinese legal world, and he does a fantastic job of imparting to the reader these complexities and how they all interrelate/integrate.

What I most admire about Professor Peerenboom's scholarship is how his analyses incorporate a multitude of highly complicated aspects overlooked to some degree by almost everyone else.