Rachel E. Stern. “Activist Lawyers in Post-Tiananmen China.” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 42, no. 1 (2017): 234-251.
This essay fits China’s Human Rights Lawyers (2014) into an emerging literature on authoritarian legality. The book offers an insider view of a circle of lawyers interested in using China’s newly accessible courts as a platform for social activism. It highlights the difficulty of rights lawyers’ day-to-day work against the backdrop of the Chinese state’s long-term experiment in how to harness the power of law without ceding political control.