Sungmoon Kim's Democracy After Virtue is an impressive contribution to comparative political thought and the burgeoning literature on the relationship between East Asian Confucian traditions and liberal democracy. My aim here is to clarify and assess the overall shape of the book's main argument in part I. In concluding, I turn more briefly to Kim's account (in part II of his book) of how Confucian values such as filial piety may lend a distinctive shape to law, especially criminal law, in East Asia.