Before the Law

Before the Law is the Chinese abridged edition of the classic American jurisprudence textbook The Law at the Gate. A bestseller in the United States for over thirty years and reprinted many times, the original has been hailed as a miniature encyclopedia of Anglo-American law. This volume was adapted jointly by Peter D'Errico, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts and one of the original authors, and Deng Zibin, a research fellow at the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Chinese translator of the original work. Tailored specifically for Chinese readers, it distills more than 900,000 characters of source material into a concise new edition of just over 300,000 characters. The title comes from Kafka's parable Before the Law: a countryman hesitates at the gate of the law, unable to go forward or back, while the gatekeeper refuses him entry. This parable sets the book's central question: for whom is the law open, and whom does it shut out? Adopting the case-method approach common in American law schools, combining judicial opinions with commentary, the book explores such themes as stare decisis, judges, values, interests, identity, public interest, feminist jurisprudence, the implementation of law, police, lawyers, the adversarial system, the jury, and conflict resolution. Readers are placed in the midst of back-and-forth disputes, seeing how people with different positions in the same case argue past one another, and how legal rules are interpreted, weighed, and even distorted in specific contexts. The topics range from racial and gender equality, the death penalty, and privacy to plea bargaining, community mediation, and dispute resolution in cyberspace, balancing classic cases with contemporary social issues. Unlike a conventional textbook, this book does not rush to provide correct answers; instead, it takes the operation of law itself as its object of observation, allowing readers to experience the complexity and unease of legal discourse and legal argumentation. It can therefore serve both as an introductory text on Anglo-American law for law students and as engaging reading for general readers concerned with the judicial system and social justice.