Governance of the Rule of Law in the World City: Taking New York City and Tokyo as Reference

Author: Zhang Zhiming Xie Hongfei Liu Zhiwei Qu Tao
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: This book is the final outcome of the research project "World Cities' Rule of Law Indicators: International Reference System Study." The background of the project is the concept of Shanghai as a law-based international metropolis. It selects some typical world cities as references to provide practices worth learning from, and attempts to quantify and index the rule of law governance of world cities as much as possible in a comparable sense. Over more than a year from 2003 to 2004, the research team went through the process from project proposal to implementation, from establishing theoretical assumptions, analytical frameworks, and research methods to collecting literature, screening relevant information, and writing reports—throughout which there were numerous complexities and challenges. As scholars who have long been concerned with and studied rule of law issues, looking back on this process clearly shows that our understanding of the research topic of this project also went through a journey of confidence, confusion, and gradual clarification—sometimes bright as spring sunshine, sometimes arduous as traversing mountains and rivers, and sometimes enlightening as discovering a blossoming willow grove. Such a process itself serves as a concrete example of rule of law research. Recording it may contribute to further advancements in the field of rule of law research. This book has been included in the "Major Theoretical and Practical Issues Research Series."