Cultivating Legal Literacy: Asking for Legal Advice, Dispensing Knowledge, and Independently Resolving Disputes in Republican China

Date(s)： 2026/08/26

Time： 10:00~12:00

Venue： Research 1st Meeting Room

Host： Prof. Sun Huei-min (Associate research fellow, IMH, AS)

Speaker：Prof. Johanna S. Ransmeier (Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Chicago)

Organizer： Women and Gender History Research Group

Abstract,
This talk compares legal advice columns from China’s Republican period and considers these columns as a possible source for developing legal literacy. Advice columns spoke to different audiences, employing varied strategic discursive techniques and requiring varying levels of education from their readers and correspondents. Read across time, the columns describe an experiment with detaching the legal sphere from the political that signaled a retrenchment of conservative values and a transition away from legal confrontation as a constitutive element of citizenship in an embattled republic that, when faced with crisis, tried to demand national loyalty over civic confrontation. Although lawyers used legal advice columns to advertise their practices, the legal education they promised laypeople often instructed readers to resolve their personal conflicts in accordance with the law, independently, without over- burdening the formal court system.