Stanley Lubman (AB, LLB, LLM, JSD, Columbia University) has specialized on China as scholar and practicing lawyer for over fifty years. He is Resident Lecturer (retired) and Research Associate at the Berkeley Law School, University of California, and previously taught at the law schools of Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale as well as others in Europe. His online column on Chinese law ran in the "China Real Time Report" at The Wall Street Journal.

From 1978 to 1997, while continuing his academic activities he headed the China practice at two major San Francisco law firms and a large English firm of solicitors.

He was advisor to The Asia Foundation on legal reform projects in China from 1998 to 2011.

Among his publications are Bird in a Cage: Legal Reform in China After Mao (Stanford University Press, 1999), and The Evolution of Law Reform in China: an Uncertain Path (editor, Edward Elgar, 2012).

Last Updated: August 2, 2017

Conversation

02.25.18

Xi Won’t Go

Richard McGregor, Taisu Zhang & more
In a surprise Sunday move, Beijing announced that the Communist Party leadership wants to abolish the two-term limit for China’s president and vice president, potentially paving the way for China’s 64-year-old President Xi Jinping to stay in power...

Viewpoint

01.19.18

China’s Leaders Are Poised to Strike a Blow to Its Legal System

Stanley Lubman
President Xi Jinping has escalated China’s war on corruption with a proposed new law that would expand the reach of the Party in an unprecedented manner. Under current law, two formally separate entities deal with cases of corruption: A Party...

Viewpoint

12.14.17

Can Environmental Lawsuits in China Succeed?

Stanley Lubman
Air and water pollution are rising in China, and so is the number of lawsuits against polluters. Access to the courts is growing: Chinese prosecutors and some NGOs have been empowered to sue polluters, and activist lawyers increasingly participate...

Viewpoint

09.15.17

The Unprecedented Reach of China’s Surveillance State

Stanley Lubman
The Chinese Party-state is building a social credit system for collecting information about all of its citizens by police, courts, and other institutions. This enables the government to reach into society to a degree unprecedented in history...

Viewpoint

08.03.17

China’s ‘New Achievements’ in Legal Reform Exist More in Policy than in Practice

Stanley Lubman
It is no coincidence that two days after Liu Xiaobo’s death, Xinhua published an article praising China’s “new achievements in judicial protection of human rights.” The judicial reforms the article mentions have not yet been fully implemented and...

Conversation

02.12.15

Is Mao Still Dead?

Rebecca E. Karl, Michael Schoenhals & more
It has long been standard operating procedure for China’s leaders to pay tribute to Mao. Even as the People’s Republic he wrought has embraced capitalist behavior with ever more heated ardor, the party he founded has remained firmly in power and his...

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