Li Chen
Associate Professor, Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC)
Associate Professor, Graduate Department of History
Associate Professor, Faculty of Law (Cross-Appointed)
Areas of interest
- Late Imperial and Modern China (14th-20th Centuries)
- International Law
- East Asian Legal Cultures
- Comparative Law
Biography
Main Bio
Professor Li Chen, J.D. (Illinois) and Ph.D. (Columbia), is a faculty member of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (UTSC), the Graduate Department of History, and the Faculty of Law (cross-appointed) at the University of Toronto.
He served as Associate Chair (2015–2016) and then Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies at UTSC (July 2016–June 2019). He was the founding President of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (ISCLH) (2014–2017) and is currently a Board Director of ISCLH and of the American Society for Legal History (2025–2028).
His research and teaching interests include late imperial and modern China (15th–20th centuries), Chinese law and society, Sino-Western relations, international law and history, and empire and postcolonial studies.
Select publications
- “Law, Empire, and Historiography of Modern Sino-Western Relations: A Case Study of the Lady Hughes Controversy in 1784,” Law & History Review 27.1 (2009): 1-53 (won honorable mention for the Law and Society Association’s 2011 Article Prize, and translated into Chinese as “法律、帝国与近代中西关系历史学,” 北大法律评论 (Peking University Law Review) 12.2 (Sept. 2011): 437-81).
- “Universalism and Equal Sovereignty as Contested Myths of International Law in the Sino-Western Encounter,” Journal of the History of International Law13.1 (2011):75-116 (translated into Chinese by 法律史译评 (Legal History Studies: Translation and Critiques).
- “Legal Specialists and Judicial Administration in Late Imperial China, 1651-1911,” Late Imperial China 33.1 (June 2012): 1-54 (translated into Chinese as “清代的法律专家与地方司法运作 (1651-1911),” 法制史研究 (Journal for Legal History Studies 28 (Dec. 2015).
- “Power of Knowledge: The Role of Secret and Published Treatises of Private Legal Specialists in the Qing Juridical Field” (知识的力量: 清代幕友秘本和公开出版的律学著作对清代司法场域的影响), Journal of Zhejiang University 45.1 (Jan. 2015): 13-32 (in Chinese).
- “Contestation over Legal Knowledge and Limits of Imperial Power in Qing China,” in Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (Brill, 2015), 254-86 (translated into Chinese in 复旦法律评论 (Fudan Law Review), March 2016).
- “Rethinking Chinese Law and History: An Introduction,” co-authored with Madeleine Zelin, in Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice, and Transformation, 1530s-1950s, edited by Chen and Zelin (Brill, 2015), 1-14.
- “Affective Sovereignty, International Law, and China’s Legal Status in the Nineteenth Century,” in The Scaffold of Sovereignty: A Global Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Zvi Ben-Dor Benite, Stefanos Geroulanos and Nichole Jerr (Columbia University Press, 2017), 421-39.
- “Traditionalizing Chinese Law: Symbolic Epistemic Violence of the Discourse of Legal Reform and Modernity in Late Qing China,” In Chinese Legal Reform and the Global Legal Order: Adoption and Adaption (Cambridge University Press, 2017), eds. Michael Ng and Yun Zhao, 181-210.
- “The State as Victim: Ethical Politics of Injury Claims and Revenge in International Relations,” in Injury and Injustice: The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress, eds., Anne Bloom, David Engel, and Michael McCann (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 293-316.
- “Concretizing the Legal Professional Community in Late Imperial China, c.1700–1900,” Asian Journal of Law and Society 11, no. 3 (Sept. 2024): 260-287.
- “Rethinking the Chinese Legal Tradition: Ideological Formations and Their Disputed Legacy,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 36, no. 4 (2026), 664-694.
- “Strict Liability and the State of Exception to International Law in ‘Semi-colonial’ China,” in The Cambridge History of International Law, Volume 2: International Law in Asia, edited by Maria Adele Carrai and Surabhi Ranganathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2026), 705-733.
- He is the author of Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice and Transcultural Politics (Columbia, 2016) (available here), co-editor of Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice and Transformation, 1530s–1950s (with Madeleine Zelin, Brill, 2015) (available here), and a contributor to Pierre-Étienne Will’s Official Handbooks and Anthologies of Imperial China: A Descriptive and Critical Bibliography (Brill, 2021). He also published, in Chinese, a co-edited volume, Pathways of Scholarship: Interdisciplinary Conversations with International Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2023), and an anthology, Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire (2024).
- His first monograph, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (pre-1900 China) and an Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History.
- His second English monograph, Invisible Power in Late Imperial China, funded by a five-year SSHRC Standard Research Grant, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in 2027. It examines the role of technical expertise and legal specialists in shaping law and governance in late imperial China.
- He is also working on a book on the cultural and comparative history of Qing criminal justice and capital punishment, supported by a five-year SSHRC Insight Grant. More information about his research can be found here.
News & Media
March 20, 2024