Building on extensive fieldwork in China and Indonesia, Hurst offers a valuable comparison of legal systems in practice.

William Hurst is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University, Illinois. For this book, he completed more than two years of field research across rural and urban settings of multiple provinces in both Indonesia and China. His first book, The Chinese Worker after Socialism (Cambridge, 2009), explored the economic, social, and political causes and ramifications of more than 35 million job losses in China's state-owned enterprises, based on more than two years of fieldwork and over 350 interviews in nine Chinese cities.

Introduction; 1. Understanding legal regimes; 2. Historical overview of Chinese and Indonesian legal regimes; 3. Law and revolution: mobilizational justice and charismatic politics; 4. Rule by law: authoritarian legitimacy and legal efficiency; 5. Neotraditional sclerosis: law in the service of stagnant hierarchies.