Yun-chien Chang is the Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law and director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture.
Thursday, February 19, 2026
4:00 PM - 5:15 PM
UCLA Law School Room 2473
This article advances a new theory of legal knowledge diffusion, positing that legal diffusion and knowledge diffusion are, respectively, negatively and positively correlated with generality; because legal knowledge diffusion is shaped by both forces, the relationship between the level of legal knowledge diffusion and generality takes a U-shaped form. Drawing on a unique dataset of more than 824,000 citations in nine leading law journals in China from 1990 to 2024, analyzed through a sentence-embedding algorithm and descriptive statistics, this article demonstrates that the pattern of citations to American legal scholarship in law journals in China accords with our theoretical prediction. Our theory thus explains why some American scholars who are highly cited in the United States have not gained comparable traction in China. Extensions of the theory consider the flattening of the legal diffusion curve over time, the downward shift of the legal diffusion curve (due to the waning of foreign influence), and the upward shift of the knowledge diffusion curve (driven by the increasing availability of Chinese translations). The latter, in particular, explains why certain American scholars with relatively low citation counts in the United States have become highly cited in China.
Authors: Chiayu Liu, Jinhua Cheng, Yun-chien Chang
Speaker: Yun-chien Chang (he/him/his). Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law, Director of Clarke Program in East Asian Law & Culture, Cornell Law School. Core Faculty, Cornell East Asia Program.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies