The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is delighted to announce that Ming-hsi Chu, a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Northwestern University, has won the 2025 Graduate Student Paper Competition from Law & Social Inquiry (LSI) for his article “Taxing Aliens and International Law: Nationalist China’s (1928-1949) Income Tax Negotiations with Treaty Powers.” A continuation of his previous work at the ASIL International Law and Social Sciences Interest Group’s First Biennial Workshop, Chu’s article examines how Chinese international lawyers used international law to assert fiscal sovereignty through income tax reform during China’s Nationalist period.
The ABF is the institutional home of LSI, a quarterly publication that analyzes law, legal institutions, and the legal profession from a sociolegal perspective. Every year, LSI conducts a competition for the best journal-length paper in the field of law and social science written by a graduate or law student. Submissions are evaluated by LSI’s editors, and the winning submission will be sent to scholars for advisory reviews prior to publication.
Drawing on a variety of American, German, British, and Chinese diplomatic archives, Chu’s paper explores how Chinese lawyers during the Nationalist period used international law to assert fiscal sovereignty with income tax reform. The paper does so through three main arguments: First, Chinese lawyers treated foreign taxation as a legal issue central to state-building; second, treaty powers’ decision-making was influenced by international law, as evidenced by their engagement with China’s legal arguments; and third, international law, particularly the doctrine of fiscal authority was itself imperial in nature and disadvantaged emerging states by imposing standards they struggled to attain. Chu’s paper illustrates how Western-trained Chinese lawyers sought to use international legal doctrine both as a tool for modernization and a means of challenging imperial structures—insights that continue to be relevant in current debates about global tax justice.
“Chu’s carefully researched paper advances our understanding of the historical development of foreign taxation,” said Traci Burch, ABF Research Professor and Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. “The editorial board is delighted to publish such high-quality work, especially when it is produced by a talented early career scholar.”
“I’m honored that LSI has recognized this work,” said Chu. “Working with these diplomatic archives showed me that international law has always been a contested terrain where emerging states must simultaneously work within and challenge existing power structures.”
###
About the American Bar Foundation
The American Bar Foundation (ABF) is the world’s leading research institute for the empirical and interdisciplinary study of law. The ABF seeks to expand knowledge and advance justice through innovative, interdisciplinary, and rigorous empirical research on law, legal processes, and legal institutions. To further this mission the ABF will produce timely, cutting-edge research of the highest quality to inform and guide the legal profession, the academy, and society in the United States and internationally. The ABF’s primary funding is provided by the American Bar Endowment and the Fellows of The American Bar Foundation.