Law And Local Society In Late Imperial China

Based on case files, this study explores the social significance of the traditional Chinese legal system, and investigates how people utilized the courts during the course of criminal and civil disputes. The author emphasizes the ways in which law shaped social and economic change and how in turn the legal code and court system were adapted to local realities.

Exploring local practices of dispute resolution and laying bare the routine role of violence in the late-Qing dynasty, Conflict, Community, and the State in Late Imperial Sichuan demonstrates the significance of everyday violence in ordering, disciplining, and building communities. The book examines over 350 legal cases that comprise the "cases of unnatural death" archival file from 1890 to 1900 in Ba County, Sichuan province. The archive presents an untidy array of death, including homicides, suicides, and found bodies. An analysis of the muddled and often petty disputes found in these records reveals the existence of a local system of authority that disciplined and maintained daily life. Often relying on violence, this local justice system occasionally intersected with the state’s justice system, but was not dependent on it. This study demonstrates the importance of informal, local authority to our understanding of justice in the late Qing era. Providing a non-elite perspective on Qing power, law, justice, and the role of the state, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese and Asian history, as well as legal history and comparative studies of violence.

In this fascinating, multidisciplinary volume, scholars of Chinese history, law, literature, and religions explore the intersections of legal practice with writing in many different social contexts. They consider the overlapping concerns of legal culture and the arts of crafting persuasive texts in a range of documents including crime reports, legislation, novels, prayers, and law suits. Their focus is the late Ming and Qing periods (c. 1550-1911); their documents range from plaints filed at the local level by commoners, through various texts produced by the well-to-do, to the legal opinions penned by China's emperors. Writing and Law in Late Imperial China explores works of crime-case fiction, judicial handbooks for magistrates and legal secretaries, popular attitudes toward clergy and merchants as reflected in legal plaints, and the belief in a parallel, otherworldly judicial system that supports earthly justice.

The topic of this book is the early introduction and reception of international law in China. International law is studied as part of the introduction of the Western sciences and as a theoretical orientation in international affairs 1847-1911.

This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual behavior criminalized by the state, showing how regulation shifted away from status to a new regime of gender that mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability for all people, regardless of their social status.

Asserting that litigation in late imperial China was a form of documentary warfare, this book offers a social analysis of the men who composed legal documents. Litigation masters emerge as central players in many of the most scandalous cases in 18th- and 19th-century China.

In Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low and Robin D.S. Yates offer the first detailed study and translation into English of two important early Chinese legal texts from the Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE).

Legal history studies have often focused mainly on codified law, without attention to actual practice, and on the past, without relating it to the present. As the title—Research from Archival Case Records: Law, Society, and Culture in China—of this book suggests, the authors deliberately follow the research method of starting from court actions and only on that basis engage in discussions of laws and legal concepts and theory. The articles cover a range of topics and source materials, both past and present. They provide some surprising findings—about disjunctures between code and practice, adjustments between them, and how those reveal operative principles and logics different from what the legal texts alone might suggest. Contributors are: Kathryn Bernhardt, Danny Hsu, Philip C. C. Huang, Christopher Isett, Yasuhiko Karasawa, Margaret Kuo, Huaiyin Li, Jennifer M. Neighbors, Bradly W. Reed, Matthew H. Sommer, Huey Bin Teng, Lisa Tran, Elizabeth VanderVen, and Chenjun You.