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Extraterritorial Courts in East Asia: Cross-Border Judicial Activity in the Crosshairs

Can any study of legal history limit itself to a single nation-state? Posing such a question is a brazen act—at least among American historians, many of the most illustrious of whom have long considered foreign institutions in modern colonial settings to be of marginal importance. During the early 1980s I stumbled upon contemporary accounts of foreigners operating courts in China. While I was checking out one such account from Stanford’s library, David Kennedy looked down at the word “extraterritoriality” in the book’s title and exclaimed, “Extraterritoriality? I thought no one was working on that!” Several years later, Jonathan Spence urged me to choose the wholly national Chinese Supreme Court for my doctoral dissertation, rather than the multinational International Mixed Court of Shanghai. (It was the only time I ignored his advice.) Two recent books push back against that long-prevailing diminution of extraterritoriality by affixing such cross-border activities in their crosshairs. Pär Kristoffer Cassel’s Grounds of Judgment and Teemu Ruskola’s Legal Orientalism, convincingly reveal the importance of extraterritorial courts by pulling off that most difficult of tasks in legal history, namely, the telling of a detailed narrative and then illuminating it with connections to larger concepts. For both Cassel, a historian, and Ruskola, a law professor, foreign courts in East Asia provide a rich trove of material on grand themes about modern history that these authors could not have developed by researching purely national courts. Their ambitious projects build for us a richer picture of how a predatory version of such courts left a lasting impression on the people who were