In China, corporate management and business transactions often relegate the legal system to a more peripheral role. Chinese companies then encounter formidable institutional obstacles when operating in developed countries with robust, strict, and complex legal systems. Obviously, nowhere else are the hurdles as high as in the United States. How then do Chinese investors negotiate the omnipresent legal risks? This chapter begins with an overview of China’s outbound direct investment in the United States. It then introduces research questions ranging from the role of in-house legal counsel in Chinese companies to their legal responses to unfair treatment by the US government. Next, this chapter selectively summarizes and critically reviews the existing literature pertinent to the interactions between multinational companies and the complex US legal system. From this, I formulate a comprehensive theoretical framework predicated on dual institutional influence, which will be applied consistently throughout the book. The chapter concludes with a description of the research methodology.

Nearly all legal theorists agree that publicity is a key component of the rule of law, but they disagree over what this means. Some mean that persons must know the body of law they are subject to; others say that persons must simply be able to access what the law requires of them, even if they remain completely ignorant of it. Both accounts of legal publicity are deeply flawed, I argue. After establishing this, I develop a new way of understanding what legal publicity means. Legal publicity is not about persons knowing the law or having access to it. Rather, it’s about when persons are held accountable for violating the law. Publicity demands that persons be held accountable for violating a law only if they were aware this law regulated their conduct. This novel account of legal publicity revolutionizes how we should think about the rule of law and also how we should design our legal institutions.