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In Qin and Han times, the establishment of a complex legal system that applied to every member of the empire brought about an unprecedented transformation of the husband–wife relationship, changing it from a bond largely determined by customs, rituals, and family elders to one regulated by law.1 Records of recently discovered legal cases from pre- and early imperial China provide a welcome supplement to the limited and well-studied records of married life found in traditionally transmitted texts.2 The legal cases, which may represent actual transcriptions or edited and embellished statements of husbands and wives embroiled in criminal cases, were preserved in two separate caches of documents. One collection was found in a Western Han tomb at Zhangjiashan 張家山 in Jiangling County, Hubei Province. The other cache, a collection of unprovenanced texts, was purchased by the Yuelu Academy 嶽麓書院 when it came up for sale on the Hong Kong antiques market in 2007. The Book of Submitted Doubtful Cases (Zouyan shu 奏讞書) from Zhangjiashan includes six cases that were most likely compiled during the Qin imperial period and sixteen more from the opening years of the Han, with the final date of the compilation ranging between ca. 196 and 186 BCE.3 The other collection of cases, Four Types of Documents for Trying Criminal Cases and Other [Procedures] (Wei yu deng si zhuang zhong 為獄等狀四種), dates to the pre-imperial period of Qin, ranging between 246 and 222 BCE.4
The Book of Submitted Doubtful Cases (hereafter Doubtful Cases) and the Four Types of Documents for Trying Criminal Cases and Other [Procedures] (hereafter Trying Criminal Cases) set forth legal cases that confounded local officials and were therefore sent to higher officials for judgment or approval. Still, the specific function of these two works remains unclear. Some scholars conjecture that Doubtful Cases represents actual law suits that were compiled for didactic purposes.5 Anthony Barbieri-Low and Robin Yates argue that in addition to its use as a manual that draws upon actual cases, the text may also be “a curious hybrid,” which, in the process of circulation, recopying, and literary embroidering, represents the earliest known examples of China's “courtroom fiction.”6 In contrast, all but three of the case...