The book includes the work of a selective group of scholars and illuminates the origins of Korean law, from the Chosŏn Dynasty through Japanese occupation up to the modern periods of the Republic of Korea. The book encompasses a wide range of historical developments of Korean law, not only seeking the spirit and legacies of Korean law derived from China, but also finding the uniqueness of Korean law in practice.

The book impressively reflects academic values by examining extensive volumes of literature in Korean, Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages. It covers such themes as the impacts of Confucianism as rule, as well as colonial laws and customs codified in civil/penal codes and/or legal theories, practices, and jurisprudence.

This book is reminiscent of the themes developed in the 2002 book, Internationalization of the Palace Wars (Y. Dezalay & B.G. Garth, University of Chicago Press, 2002), which concerned the contests for epistemic and economic power in Latin America. These two books deal with the processes of the modernization of laws and the rule of law, the establishment of legal institutions in the Asian and Latin American continental countries, which share colonial domination and independence, capitalistic economic growth followed by dictatorship and democratization experiences in common.

The book encompasses a clearly external point of view on law in Korea, as captured by the use of ‘spirit’ in the title, comprehensively covered the relationship among neighbouring countries, which are China, Japan, and Taiwan.

Law in Korea is obviously conceived of as purely colonial in origin, while the authors discern clear differences in the Korean legal spirit, leaning on legal-historical methodologies even as colonial rules have affected the modern Korean legal system. The book ascertains in detail historical evidence with reference to the Kyŏngguk Taejŏn as the primal law code of Chosŏn that replaced Chinese Ming code with its own regulations.

The book is fully devoted to focusing on the importance of colonial legacies in Korea, the deployment of family capital across generations, and the state as a site of contestation among professionalism fields. It explains how Confucianism, colonialism, and constitutionalism have penetrated Korean legal histories by tracing the ‘influence of Confucianism as a global ideology in East Asia on Chosŏn law, the replacement of traditional codes on Confucian ideology by modern laws and rules imposed by colonialism plus the rise and inculcation of the notion of national law in reaction to colonial law, and the growing prevalence of transnational and transcultural constitutionalism in modern years’ (p. 3).

The story highlights the roles and relationships of particular agencies—individual/family, legal profession, administration—in seeking to advance law as a legitimating device, succeeding to various degrees in between inter-colonial and post-colonial contexts as well.

Chapters on the formation of the Constitution and the Civil Code in post-liberation Korea (pp. 177–201) and the new establishment of the Constitutional Court distinctively from the Supreme Court (pp. 202–32) highlight the role of the Constitutional Court, analyzing several leading cases that differentiate Korea from other Asian countries in particular. It attempts to grapple with indigenous traditions of law and politics through Constitutional Court case selection. Indeed, the authors refer to the colonial encounter as the ‘geneses of law’ in Asia (p. 2), implicitly decentring the legacies of robust pre-colonial Chinese and Japanese legal traditions.

As noted, however, ‘the birth of the Constitution does not mean the establishment of a political leadership with sufficient moral and practical capacity to deal with the intense conflicts in postliberation politics’ (p. 199). And Korea is still in the process of modern legalization, fighting for democracy. The book never forgets to cover the most recent trajectories of legal reform in Korea, leaving tiny room for some landmark cases on the judicialization of politics and the legal reform agenda for the next trajectories. It implicates a dynamic momentum of fighting for democracy in Korean society as shown by the unprecedented and peaceful ‘Candlelight Civil Movement,’ followed by the Presidential Impeachment case of the Constitutional Court.

The book’s contribution is interpretive, allowing us to understand law in Asia as part of global processes. It provides an important lens that helps make sense of distinct developments in particular times and places. Law, in Asia and elsewhere, is part of the contested construction of state power.