Two Faces of Legal Orientalism

Abstract

“Legal Orientalism” is a critical theory, which aims to criticize and deconstruct the “universalism” constructed by the Western legal discourse and restore its locality and relativity. While denying that the East has a politico-legal tradition different from that of the West and treating the East as an object to be colonized and baptized, the West has lost the ability to improve its own politico-legal civilizations through equal dialogue among civilizations. For Chinese legal scholars, the significance of legal Orientalism’s critical perspective is not to allow us to expose the “hypocrisy of Western law” with the theoretical weapons provided by Western scholars, but to help us getting rid of the predicament of “self-Orientalism”, with an open and confident attitude to construct a legal discourse that embodies the equal subjectivity of all civilizations.