Dissertation Research: The Role of Public Interest Law in China's

该研究项目与中国合作伙伴密切合作，研究中国不断发展的公益实践如何满足9亿农村农民的法律需求。具体而言，该项目考察了农村法律援助中心如何解决中国经济发展及其伴随的城市化和移民的某些外部性，即房地产政策及其监管变化的法律后果。转型期的中国出现了在社会主义行政体制内运作的新的私有化行动者。这些关系是由土地的估价、土地的使用、所有权和转让所产生和产生的，这与仅仅一代人之前的情况有明显的不同。农村土地的新兴市场使由地区、宗教和种族界定的当地社会群体对土地价值的看法复杂化。土地法作为妥协和计算的产物，可能创造一套条件，使土地的某些类型的价值比其他类型的价值更有利于实现。因此，本研究的主要问题是：在过渡社会中，法律援助中心在调解不同行为者持有的不同形式的土地所有权方面发挥了什么作用？为了解决这一问题，本项目比较了中国农村不同法律援助中心的运作情况，以考察这些机构解决对土地使用、价值和意义的不同看法的能力。所采用的方法是现场参与客户咨询和观察索赔人访问法律援助中心以及他们与法律援助人员的互动。此外，将与当地社区成员进行半结构化访谈，以了解法律援助中心的更广泛影响。本项目以中国为例，构建关于公共利益法在转型经济中的作用的理论。

This research project, in close collaboration with Chinese partners, considers the ways in which evolving public interest practices in China are meeting the legal needs of the 900 million farmers in the countryside. Specifically, the project examines how rural legal aid centers address certain externalities of China's economic development and its concomitants of urbanization and migration, namely, the legal consequences of changing policies toward real property and its regulation. Transitional China shows the emergence of new privatized actors operating within socialist administrative systems. These relationships are both produced by and productive of valuations of land, its use, ownership, and transfer, which differ markedly from those of just a generation ago. Emergent markets in rural land complicate views of land value held by local social groups defined by region, religion, and ethnicity. Land laws, as the product of compromise and calculation, may create a set of conditions preferable to the realization of certain types of value of land over others. The leading question of this research, therefore, is: what role do legal aid centers play in mediating the different modalities of land ownership held by diverse actors in transitional societies? To address this question, the project compares the operation of different legal aid centers in rural China to examine the capacity of such institutions to address differences in views toward the use, value, and meaning of land. The methodology employed is on-site participation in client counseling and observation of claimants' visits to legal aid centers and their interaction with legal aid personnel. Further, semi-structured interviews will be conducted with members of the local community as to the wider impact of the legal aid center. The project uses the case of China to build theory about the role of public interest law in transitional economies.