Around 1900 Max Weber outlined his “scientific” method to law, identifying the “authorized rational type” as a sort of domination, not attributable to private authority but to the authority of abstract norms. Formal legal rationality was his term for the key characteristic of the kind of coherent and calculable law that was a precondition for contemporary political developments and the fashionable bureaucratic state. Weber noticed this law as having developed in parallel with the expansion of capitalism.
A new contract code in 1999 represented a transfer away from administrative domination. Furthermore, after negotiations lasting fifteen years, in 2001 China joined …

