Reading Notes

Why did a faltering Qing dynasty spend its final decade translating foreign codes, abolishing lingchi, building courts, and drafting a civil code? Returning to 1902–1911, this episode traces how foreign legal pressure, imperial self-preservation, conflict over ritual, and provincial resistance converged in reforms that failed to save the dynasty but dismantled the old Chinese legal tradition and seeded modern law.

The U.S. Constitution never expressly gives the Supreme Court power to interpret it. Returning to Marbury v. Madison (1803), this episode shows how an undelivered commission and a political struggle enabled the Court to claim judicial review and make it a cornerstone of the separation of powers.

In 1935, Shi Jianqiao shot Sun Chuanfang in a Buddhist hall in Tianjin to avenge her father, then scattered leaflets and surrendered. From her decade-long pursuit of revenge through three levels of Republican courts and a Nationalist pardon, this episode asks how traditional filial duty fared under modern criminal law.

What can one person do when the state uses textbooks to reshape memory of war? This episode follows historian Saburō Ienaga's three lawsuits over 32 years against revisions to accounts of Japan's wartime aggression, the Nanjing Massacre, and Unit 731, examining the boundaries among state screening, academic freedom, and responsibility for war.

Focusing on birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, this episode starts from the Supreme Court's then-recent procedural ruling, Wong Kim Ark, and the doctrine's history. It traces how the Trump administration challenged the principle through an executive order and litigation, and examines the contest between jus soli and jus sanguinis.