Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work. By Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12318
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Published date: 01 March 2018

To be fair, Kirkland does note the stinginess of the American social

welfare system, and this is of course not her main subject. But given

that the vaccine court is an attempt to get more justice for the families

ofthosewhomayhavebeeninjured,itiswisetoremindourselves

that there are likely more direct routes to justice. And it behooves us

to ask whether the best use of legal energy is producing workarounds.

References

Heimer, Carol A. (2010) “The Unstable Alliance of Law and Morality.” in Hitlin, S. &

Vaisey, S., eds., Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. New York:Springer. 179–202.

Horowitz, Ruth (2013) In the Public Interest: Medical Licensing and the Disciplinary Process.

New Brunswick: Rutgers Univ.Press.

Shapiro, Susan P. (2015) “Do Advance Directives Direct?,” 40 J. of Health Politics, Policy

and Law 487–530.

Zussman, Robert (1992) Intensive Care: Medical Ethics and the Medical Profession. Chicago:

Univ.of Chicago Press.

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Criminal Defense in China: The Politics of Lawyers at Work. By Sida Liu

and Terence C. Halliday. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Reviewed by Rachel E. Stern, School of Law, University of California,

Berkeley

This lucid book is an important addition to a groundswell of

research on Chinese lawyers. Aimed squarely at a sociolegal audi-

ence, it bridges two familiar research agendas: how lawyers work,

and their prospects for political activism. The latter theme has been

particularly prominent in writing about China, as observers reflect

on the real world rise of legal activism as a form of political partici-

pation. But evaluating Chinese lawyers as a political force is chal-

lenging. Social scientists find ourselves sandwiched between

journalists and historians, responsible for finding a narrative to link

day-to-day news items, but without the benefit of knowing how the

story turns out. Fortunately, Criminal Defense in China is written by

two of the people best-equipped for this task, sociologists Sida Liu

(University of Toronto) and Terence Halliday (American Bar Foun-

dation). The book focuses on criminal defense as a “sensitive pulse

in China’s social and political life,” and is firmly founded on 329

interviews and two careers spent considering the worldwide evolu-

tion of the legal profession (xiii).

276 Book Reviews