This chapter explores and assesses the significance of the adoption of a separate part (or, book 编) on personality rights in China’s new Civil Code. We argue that there are profound socioeconomic meanings underlying the technical changes in the classic structure of the civil codes in civil law tradition. On one hand, the stand-alone part on personality rights is the fruit and embodiment of the rising rights consciousness of personality in Chinese civil society, which has been largely unexplored in existing China studies. On the other hand, the part provides a new legislative model to comprehensively tackle the pervasive technological challenges to the protection of personal spheres, which is entangled with the rising rights consciousness over personality in China. Yet, the robustness of the acknowledgment of personality rights in this special part in promoting the protection of such rights remains to be tested in future court judgments.

To better understand the actual role of the law within the PRC, Western observers employed, over time, different filters: Chinese traditions, Confucianism, observance of Soviet patterns, independent Marxist-Maoism, legal transplants from the West, and so forth. This paper aims to investigate the role played by some Soviet legal theories in the making of Chinese civil law. In particular, it recalls the tension between Formalism and Anti-formalism in the making of a Civil law with Chinese characteristics, from the times of encumbering Soviet models to the most recent era of (re)codification.

Chapter 2 examines the largely overlooked writings of nineteenth-century clinicians, scientists, lawyers, and jurists who actually called for a third sex to be added alongside the ranks of “male” and “female” because, quite plainly, there were individuals for whom no “true sex” could be identified. The inflexibility of the Napoleonic Code, which required that all infants be sexed as either male or female at birth, was challenged by doctors and legal forensics experts who believed either that the Code was out of step with scientific progress, or that it did not do enough to protect citizens from “hermaphrodites.” In sensationalized court cases that riveted domestic and international audiences – both scientific and lay – doctors and jurists struggled to reconcile cases of “doubtful sex” with scientific evidence, social welfare, and the Code itself. Intersex people came into conflict with the law from the moment of their birth. Jurisconsults enthusiastically contradicted one another about the veracity of sex determinations, while influential men labored to revise laws regarding birth certificates, marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Ultimately, the only party remaining silent on “hermaphrodism” was the Code itself, ensuring that a legal blind spot only increased the visibility of those it tried not to see.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of how early Republican (1912-28) and Nationalist (1928-49) criminal and civil codes changed the focus of parent–child relations. Republican criminal law maintained some parental privileges in an attenuated manner where children’s physical offense against parents was concerned. At the same time, the Republican court and law enforcement reprimanded and punished abusive or irresponsible parents, and occasionally took away minor children from parents who were deemed disqualified based on neighbors' reports. Republican law also removed the label of filial rebellion from children’s accusation of parents, supporting children’s defense of their interests in defiance of parents. The Republican state’s exercise of parens patriae over minors and its endorsement of adult children’s challenge of parental authority indicate a new understanding of children primarily as rights-bearing citizens whose defining relationship was with the state, not with parents.

Through an analysis of the codification of family law, this chapter argues that the process of institutionalizing democracy in South Korea created ambivalent legal bases for women’s rights. Amid the peninsula’s division, the occupation of the US Military Government, the onset of the Cold War, and the Korean War, South Korea began to institutionalize democracy before it could complete the process of decolonization. In the historical context of postcoloniality, women came to symbolize democracy and capitalism with the new Civil Code that remade women into full legal subjects with rights. Yet, women were also treated as the last remaining repositories of Korea’s “national tradition” in the legislative discussions that led to the promulgation of the new Civil Code. As a result, women’s rights were significantly compromised. This duality demonstrates key tensions in the conceptualization of equal rights in contexts of postcolonial democracy.

Though legal plots are a common feature of the nineteenth-century European novel, the massive legal changes brought about by the French Revolution made law a uniquely important theme of French fiction, and changed the way novelists made use of it. In the early part of the century, Romantic novelists’ meditations on law, such as those of Mme de Staël, reflected their eighteenth-century intellectual inheritance, in attempting to understand if and how individual happiness and social duty could be reconciled by enlightened legal reform. Yet later novelists abandoned such utopian abstractions, to see in law the very epitome of the ‘realist’ view of the world that ultimately gave them their name: law, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac suggest, is about compromise with imperfect systems, the balancing of competing interests, and the operation of power—it is, in short, political. To learn the law, as so many nineteenth-century heroes set out to do, is thus to learn ‘the way of the world’. Finally, however, nineteenth-century novelists saw in the language of the law (and especially the Civil Code of 1804) a model for, and indeed a rival to, their own task: to build worlds in words, to speak ideas into being.

This Introduction distills the three themees of the book and summarizes the gist of the eleven chapters.