The following is a guest post by Laney Zhang, Foreign Law Specialist for China.

Cover of Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path, edited by Stanley B. Lubman.

On May 1 we celebrated Law Day 2013 here at the Law Library of Congress by presenting a panel discussion on the “Movement in America for Civil and Human Rights.”  For those who are not familiar with it, Law Day is a “national day to celebrate the rule of law and its contributions to the freedoms that Americans enjoy.”

The rule of law is also a crucial issue in the development of the Chinese legal system, which closely relates to other key issues of this rapidly changing country, including its sociopolitical stability and prospects of its economic growth.  The Chinese government recently underwent a leadership transition.  It remains to be seen whether the new leadership will live up to the goal of establishing Western-style rule of law and constitutionalism.

For readers interested in legal reform in China, here is a list of new books I’d like to highlight.  They are all in English, published in 2012 or later, and available at the Law Library of Congress for your use.  Of course, you can always search the whole collection by using the Library of Congress online catalog.

• Evolution of Law Reform in China: An Uncertain Path(Stanley B. Lubman ed., 2012);
  

  Contents page of In the Name of Justice: Striving for the Rule of Law in China, by He Weifang.

• He Weifang, In the Name of Justice: Striving for the Rule of Law in China (Brookings Institution Press, 2012);
• Qianfan Zhang, Constitution of China: a Contextual Analysis (Hart Publishing, 2012);
• Jonathan Benney, Defending Rights in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2013);
• Xiaobing Li and Qiang Fang, Modern Chinese Legal Reform: New Perspectives (University Press of Kentucky, 2013);
• Rethinking Law and Development: The Chinese Experience (Guanghua Yu ed., 2013); and
• China, Democracy, and Law: A Historical and Contemporary Approach (Mireille Delmas-Marty and Pierre-Etienne Will eds.; translated by Naomi Norberg with a foreword by Philip A. Kuhn, 2012).

I would like to thank Sabrina Hsu, head of the Law Library’s stack services division, for her help in preparing this post.