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Theodore Roosevelt once wrote “comparison is the thief of joy.” Nowhere may this be more apparent than in the US-China relationship. Whether it’s the size of economies or navies, Olympic gold medal count, box office hits and soft power, or manufacture of electric vehicles and semiconductors, the US and China are constantly comparing each other. This comparing applies to law, too. Contrary to conventional understandings of comparative law as a dispassionate endeavor, this talk argues that US-China comparative law projects are riddled with emotion, including distrust, anger, frustration, and fear. On the Chinese side, Chinese scholars are learning from US-style extraterritoriality and building extraterritorial jurisdiction into the PRC legal system. On the US side, state governments are responding to the “China threat,” which is, in part, about extraterritorial reach, by creating their own national security regimes that limit Chinese access to US markets. Through comparative law projects, states politicize certain kinds of emotion which become strategic assets to be mobilized against competitors. Against a backdrop of economic “decoupling,” the increasingly intense legal interactions between the US and Chinese systems and their emotional effects show what I call adversarial comparativism, the affective study of other legal systems not to emulate the other but to defeat it, perhaps a unique relationship in the history of comparative law. Drawing on the growing attention to emotion in the social sciences and empirical data from both the US and China, this talk explains how adversarial comparativism works, how it doesn’t, and its implications for a legally fragmented world.

Open to all, informal lunch provided.

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