Thursday, May 15, 2025
1:30 PM - 3:00 PM
Bunche Hall 10383
Michelson will present work in progress building on his 2022 book,
Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts, which, from an analysis of the written court decisions of almost 150,000 divorce trials in two Chinese provinces spanning 2009 and 2016, reveals the extent to which and ways in which judges strategically misrepresented and subverted the law in their efforts to deny divorce petitions, even those involving domestic violence. Preliminary findings he presents from two sets of new analyses are even grimmer than the picture he painted in his book. First, in order to assess both the generalizability of judicial decision-making behavior in two provinces and the impact of China’s 2015 Anti-Domestic Violence Law (which took effect in March 2016), he updates his findings by analyzing over 100,000 court decisions from all 31 provincial-level units between 2017 and 2024. Second, he analyzes video recordings from 130 divorce trials, all involving allegations of domestic violence, in 15 provinces between 2019 and 2024. Michelson applies Harry Frankfurt’s concept of “bullshit” to judges’ routine strategies of distorting and even fabricating law as pretexts for disaffirming claims of domestic violence and for omitting from their written decisions compelling evidence submitted in support of such claims. Bullshitting complements lying and gaslighting. Whereas liars try to convince people that a falsehood is true, and gaslighters try to alter people’s perceptions of reality, bullshitters know they can get away with bullshitting even if no one believes them. Bullshitting is therefore a display of power reminding people of their powerlessness to resist.
Ethan Michelson is Professor of Sociology and Law at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society since 2003. He has won several awards for his published research on China’s legal system.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies