Speaker Series: Taisu Zhang
This article argues that legal professions, regardless of socioeconomic, political, cultural, or ideological context, naturally drift towards jurisprudential internalism. Zhang defines “legal internalism” as a behavioral paradigm in which legal actors treat legal rules as normative, epistemologically self-contained, and systemically coherent. Such a paradigm is deeply controversial within the legal academy: formalists embrace it as objectively “correct,” whereas realists reject it as empirically false and conceptually incoherent.
Regardless of what scholars believe, he argues—first at the level of behavioral theory, then through empirical illustration—that internalism naturally appeals to lawyers and judges due to the socioeconomic incentive structures they face. Once socially accepted, internalism greatly increases the legal knowledge gap between specialists and non-specialists, rendering legal comprehension easier for trained lawyers and but more difficult for laymen. This enhances the legal profession’s functional dominance over legal interpretation, which in turn enhances its prestige, sociopolitical stature, and earning power. As a result, legal professionals will tend to behaviorally embrace internalism regardless of its intellectual merits. Legal scholars, in contrast, have different incentive structures that significantly dilute the appeal of internalism.
These are universalist theoretical claims that should apply in nearly every socioeconomic and political context. Although a full empirical proof is clearly impossible in a single article, we demonstrate their applicability to six of the world’s most important legal systems: the United States, China, Germany, England, Japan, and India. In all six countries, which otherwise diverge dramatically in wealth, size, politics, culture, and institutions, legal professionals behaviorally drift towards internalism over time. They do so despite some significant political and intellectual obstacles, and often in an explicitly self-interested manner. In contrast, legal scholars in several of these countries are visibly more skeptical towards internalism.
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Taisu Zhang is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School and works on comparative legal and economic history, private law theory, and contemporary Chinese law and politics. He is the author of two books, The Ideological Foundations of Qing Taxation: Belief Systems, Politics, and Institutions (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Laws and Economics of Confucianism: Kinship and Property in Pre-Industrial China and England (Cambridge University Press, 2017). These are the first two entries in a planned trilogy of books on the institutional and cultural origins of early modern economic divergence. He is currently writing two other books: the first, The Authoritarian Functions of Law (And Their Application to Contemporary China), is under contract with Harvard University Press and examines the political and socioeconomic logic of legalization in China. The second, tentatively titled The Cultural-Legal Origins of Economic Divergence, completes the trilogy mentioned above. Zhang’s academic articles and essays have recently appeared in journals such as the Journal of Legal Studies, the Journal of Legal Analysis, the Yale Law Journal, and the Harvard Law Review. His work has won awards and prizes from a number of academic organizations.
Zhang is a Global Faculty member at Peking University Law School and holds secondary appointments at Yale in the History Department and the Jackson School. He has also taught at the Duke University School of Law, the University of Hong Kong, Brown University, and the Tsinghua University School of Law. He serves as co-editor of Studies in Legal History, the book series of the American Society for Legal History (published by Cambridge University Press). He is a regular commentator on law and politics in media outlets, in both English and Chinese.