Contemporary International Law ♦ Article 65 Va. J. Int’l L. 371 (2025)

The Law of Information States: Evidence from China and the United States

BRIDGET FAHEY, YUPING LIN, & TAISU ZHANG

Government could not function—legally, administratively, or politically—without producing information about the population, the economy, crime, elections, public health, and more. This Article theorizes the informational incentives of political and administrative officials and the legal interventions that can control them. It then uses case studies in the United States and China to illustrate those informational dynamics in practice. Our account reveals a novel form of information regulation: government structure and, in particular, the vertical division of informational powers between levels of government, or “informational federalism.” We describe the use of informational federalism and its distinctive functions as part of the portfolio of informational production law in regimes that are both strongly federalist like the United States and strongly centralized like China.