East Asian Legal Studies Talk:< /div>

Jedidiah Kroncke

Associate Professor of Law\, The University of Hong Kong

The life of Chinese legal scholar Wu Jingxiong has long a ttracted attention for his diverse intellectual interests and high profile in Chinese judicial politics and constitutional reform during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet\, Wu’s life after the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 has received less attention. During this period\, Wu spent fifteen years in the United States\, primarily teaching law at Seton Hall University. While the least studied time of his life\, this era was a critical juncture in his o ngoing quest to reconcile his Confucian sympathies with his Catholic faith. Wu’s ultimate return to Taiwan was impacted by the complications of these debates crosscut by Cold War geopolitical tensions. Wu’s life is revealing not only as an example of the challenges that diasporic Chinese intellectua ls faced during this era\, but also of how his relatively unique intellectu al commitments shed light on global tensions in Catholicism and American Co ld War geopolitics. Today\, amidst rising contemporary Sino-American fricti ons and renewed debates over the role of Catholic legal thinking in US poli tics\, Wu’s complex American experience as a transnational intellectual is newly provocative and probative...(read more).

Dr. Je didiah Kroncke is an associate professor of law at the University of Ho ng Kong\, where he teaches trust law and the law of cooperative enterprises . His research centers on international legal history and the comparative s tudy of alternative labor and property institutions.

A light lunch will be provided. Please register here.

*Lo cation note: In past years\, EALS talks were generally in Morgan Courtroom (Austin 308)\, but due to the construction project currently underway next to Austin Hall\, we will hold most EALS talks in Wasserstein Hall during th e 2025-2026 academic year.

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