Law & Humanities Blog

---

The US Constitutional Model and Chinese Legal History Posted: 13 Mar 2012 11:50 AM PDT Jedidiah Kroncke, Harvard Law School, has published An Early Tragedy of Comparative Constitutionalism: Frank Goodnow & the Chinese Republic. Here is the abstract. This article recovers a lost episode in the neglected early history of American comparative constitutionalism. In 1913, pioneering comparative lawyer Frank Goodnow was sent to China to assist the new Chinese Republic in the writing of its first constitution. Goodnow's mission reflected the growing interest of America in China's legal development in this era, and his constitution-writing project won broad support from the American legal profession. Goodnow's tenure ultimately generated great controversy when he advised China to adopt constitutional monarchy rather than continue on as a republic. This article describes this controversy and how American international engagement was increasingly shaped in the early 20th century by the attempted export of American legal models as a presumptively altruistic mechanism of modernization. Goodnow's allegiance to comparative legal science agitated against this more parochial view of legal internationalism, and in the end he was excommunicated from American foreign policy affairs. More broadly, this article shows how the early history of American comparative constitutionalism had its roots in the early 20th century American discourse on colonial administration.