Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2024
Abstract
This Article surveys how a growing rivalry between the United States and China is changing the American legal system. It argues that U.S.-China conflict is reproducing, in attenuated form, the same politics of threat that has driven wartime legal development for much of our history. The result is that American law is reprising familiar patterns and pathologies. There has been a diminishment in rights among groups with imputed ties to a geopolitical adversary. But there has also been a modest expansion in rights where advocates have linked desired reforms with geopolitical goals. Institutionally, the new global conflict has at times fostered executive overreach, interbranch agreement, and interparty consensus. Legal-culturally, it has in places evinced a decline in legal rationality. Although these developments do not rival the excesses of America’s wartime past, they evoke that past and may, over time, replay it. The Article provides a framework for understanding legal developments in this new era, contributes to our understanding of rights and structure in times of conflict, and reflects on what comes next in the new global conflict, and how best to shape it.
Publication Citation
New York University Law Review, Vol. 99, Number 2, Pp. 636-716.
Scholarly Commons Citation
Jia, Mark, "American Law in the New Global Conflict" (2024). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 2606.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/2606
Included in
Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, Constitutional Law Commons, First Amendment Commons, International Law Commons, Law and Race Commons, Legal History Commons, National Security Law Commons