Some things should not be for sale. One’s body or one’s children, to take the most glaring examples. But, arguably, more trivial things like the family heirloom or a citizen’s vote should also not be bought and sold. Theorists differ both about the membership of this class (what things should not be for sale) and about the grounds for membership in it (why they should not be bought and sold). Yet there is virtual unanimity that it is not an empty set. Human beings, if nothing else, should not be sold on the market, not even by themselves (selling oneself into slavery).

In recent years, an expansive literature has been produced analyzing the moral limits of markets, focusing on the question just presented: what kinds of goods should not be bought and sold on the market.

In Chapter 2, I situate Johnnie To’s popular comedy, Justice, My Foot! (1992 審死官), which revolves around a lawyer defending a woman falsely accused of murdering her husband, in light of the drafting of the Basic Law and passage of the Bill of Rights in early-1990s Hong Kong. I argue that To’s film, which appeared at cinemas a mere three years after the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing, can be approached as a screening of a nightmare scenario on the minds of many viewers at the time: A Hong Kong-style lawyer trying to defend the innocent and maintain justice in a Chinese-style legal system that disregards basic human rights and that is plagued by corruption and nepotism. I will then explore the function of humor in the film to show how Justice, My Foot! repackages anxieties about the sinicization of law into a marketable cultural product for mass consumption.