To better understand the actual role of the law within the PRC, Western observers employed, over time, different filters: Chinese traditions, Confucianism, observance of Soviet patterns, independent Marxist-Maoism, legal transplants from the West, and so forth. This paper aims to investigate the role played by some Soviet legal theories in the making of Chinese civil law. In particular, it recalls the tension between Formalism and Anti-formalism in the making of a Civil law with Chinese characteristics, from the times of encumbering Soviet models to the most recent era of (re)codification.

Political religion is a popular concept for studying totalitarian regimes including the Soviet political regime. In this paper, I contribute to the field by utilizing it for studying Soviet law. I start with brief description of the Soviet political religion and its ideological premisesMarxism-Leninism teachings on state and society. Then I elaborate on what I call “the symbol of faith of Soviet law” a set of ideas or dogmas that exhibit the influence of Soviet political religion on Soviet law. These ideas concern the nature of Soviet law, its role in society and in the movement toward communism, how law interacts with politics and the State, and its relationship with bourgeois law. Then I show how Soviet jurisprudence developed these ideas in what I call “theology of Soviet law”. Finally, by exploring four concepts in Soviet law uniqueness, publicness, politicization, and socialist legality, I try to clarify how and to what extent Soviet political religion influenced the real legal system of the Soviet Union.

There are few events in modern history that evoke as much controversy, and possess as much political salience, as the Bolshevik Revolution. The events of 1917 continue to animate a variety of political projects, as was evident with the various symposiums on the centenary of the revolution, and the different ways in which narratives about the events inform contemporary politics. The field of international law is no different. For a long time, scholars of international law looked to the revolutionary Soviet state for an example of how a radical political orientation clashed with the principles of international law and challenged its claim to universal representation. Numerous scholars on both sides of the political divide presented an image of the Soviet state as representing ‘socialist’ international law, in contrast to the existing norms and practices of law that guided the behaviour of contemporary states.

The socialist revolution in Russia introduced large-scale nationalisations and land reforms in order to empower the peasantry and the proletariat with a vision of establishing the ‘first worker’s state’.2 A key instrument in this undertaking was the nationalisation of private property, a transformation that was legal in nature. Indeed, as Scott Newton put it: ‘the elimination of private ownership of the means of production remains a breathtaking and unexampled demonstration of the puissance of law’.3

Borrowing Gerry Simpson’s taxonomy, it was and remains common to think of the Soviet Union as both a ‘great power’ and an ‘outlaw state’. Some historical accounts portray Soviet law as elaborate, specific and complex; but simultaneously, others portray ‘Soviet law’ as a sham. This essay argues that the Soviet approach to Cold War international law hews closer to the former image than the latter. It appears that Soviet faith in international law grew over the course of the Cold War, rather than diminished. This essay is a tentative sketch of the transformation of Soviet faith in law over the course of the Cold War.

Harold J. Berman, a Jewish convert to Christianity, was a pioneer in the study of legal history, legal philosophy, and law and religion. He mapped the deep Christian and post-Christian foundations of the Western legal tradition as a whole and of many of its particular legal doctrines. He developed an integrative jurisprudence that transcended many of the dualistic dialectics of the past, and that reconciled natural law theory, legal positivism, and historical jurisprudence with each other on the basis of a holistic theory of God and humanity. He offered creative explorations of the roles of language, speech, and dialogue in the development of local and global legal communities. And he developed an innovative theory of the religious dimensions of law, the legal dimensions of religion, and the need for a healthy interaction of legal ideas, institutions, and methods in a just and orderly society. Despite the tensions that exist in all societies between religious faith and legal order, he argued, law and religion inevitably interact, and neither can maintain its vitality independently of the other. At the highest level, surely the just and the holy are one.