As Law and Literature takes root around the world, from the United States to Germany, from Israel to Hong Kong, scholars working in the interdiscipline have been exploring what it might mean to study legal-literary relations in a more global frame. In this seminar, Marco Wan posits one answer to this question by drawing on the notion of ‘circulation’ as it has been considered in debates about world literature. He will begin with a survey of recent developments in Law and Literature, and then examine questions of reception, interpretation, and translation raised by the ways in which literary texts circulate into new legal-cultural environments. He will anchor his analysis in a close reading of Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (2000), a Franco-Chinese novel about two young men who are sent to the mountains for re-education during the Cultural Revolution in China, and who discover a suitcase of forbidden Western classics.