Jonathan Ocko: A Remembrance

When I first met Jon he was already well known as Qing historian¹ and had begun his exploration of the relationship between culture, ideology, governance, and law in that period. His article on capital appeals remains the basis for our understanding of this uniquely Chinese construction of the relationship between the state and its people. At the same time, his work on family conflict and its expression and resolution within the legal framework of the Qing focused our attention on the role of law in the everyday and was an important step in the development of a major thrust of our field today—the exploration of law in practice. Today we cannot imagine Chinese legal history research that bypasses the day-to-day encounters of common people with the law or the complex interactions that comprised what in other legal traditions would be called private law. Jon was a leader in the project that made such explorations possible. He brought to that exploration a background in law as taught in US law schools and a long and productive engagement with China’s contemporary legal reform process. At the same time he came to his study of China’s legal history with a broad and deep understanding of Chinese society, economy, and politics, historical and present, that saved him time after time from the sins of omission and conflation and the lures of homogenizing theory.

My own collaboration with Jon began in 1994 and was very much alive when he left us. Jon and I both applied for Luce Foundation funding to explore the relationship between law in practice and the documents that established rights and obligations in everyday transactions. Terry Lautz, then program officer for a new multiyear research initiative at Luce, called and asked if it would make sense to combine our applications. I had never met Jon, but one conversation with him was enough to convince me that working together would be an extraordinary opportunity. Our initial project on “Contracts in Chinese Culture” combined both archival explorations and a series of workshops that brought together scholars of Chinese legal history from across the US and Asia and encouraged critical encounters with western legal history and contract/ property rights theory. Jon brought to these workshops his unique experience as a historian of China teaching the history of Chinese law to expectant JD’s at Duke. Jon’s course, along with that of Randall Edwards at Columbia, became a template for such courses and the vital conversation they can create among Chinese and western legal scholars.

Jon’s essay in the final product of these workshops² was the first of many in which Jon would explore the value of comparative legal history and the applicability of western legal theory to an understanding of the highly developed legal institutions and practices of late imperial China. These essays were part of Jon’s working out of what he intended as his principal contribution to the study of Chinese legal history, a book that might have been titled Chinese Justice, had he had the time to finish it.

Jon was a superb scholar. There are few who knew him who did not benefit from his counsel, his critiques, and his extraordinary knowledge of the documentary and literary corpus. Jon was also a master of friendship. One of the great gifts of knowing Jon was that he knew everyone. Over the years we continued occasional summer research trips to archives, and to private and university collections. The people Jon knew and the insights they provided into Chinese business, legal practice, and the work of Chinese legal educators were as enriching to our work as the documents we continued to collect. Jon’s thoughtful intellect and his commitment to friends and colleagues served him well as chair of the North Carolina State University History Department and as an adjunct professor of Chinese law at Duke. He was co-convener of the Triangle Legal History group and worked throughout his career to facilitate exchanges with counterparts in China.

Over the past few months I have had the chance to talk to many people who knew...