Ruling before the Law

William Hurst is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, Illinois. For this book, he completed more than two years of field research across rural and urban settings of multiple provinces in both Indonesia and China. His first book, The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge, 2009), explored the economic, social, and political causes and ramifications of more than 35 million job losses in China's state-owned enterprises, based on more than two years of fieldwork and over 350 interviews in nine Chinese cities.

• Introduction; 1. Understanding legal regimes; 2. Historical overview of Chinese and Indonesian legal regimes; 3. Law and revolution: mobilizational justice and charismatic politics; 4. Rule by law: authoritarian legitimacy and legal efficiency; 5. Neotraditional sclerosis: law in the service of stagnant hierarchies.

'No one but Hurst could have written this book. His close study of variation across and within two giant countries generates theoretical insights that go well beyond China and Indonesia, though scholars of each country will also profit. A monumental achievement and a major advance in socio-legal studies.' Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School