Please join Stanford China Law and Policy Association (CLPA) for a lunch talk with Prof. Yun-chien Chang, the Jack G. Clarke Professor in East Asian Law from Cornell Law School, on his exciting research on cross-border legal knowledge diffusion. The abstract of the article is as below.

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.