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Delivering Justice in Qing China provides an account of the features of civil judicial administration in Qing China based on a meticulous empirical study of magisterial archives. Because the author makes a general statement of the structure and principal arguments of the book in the introductory chapter (pp. 10-11), this review will dispense with an introduction of contents, and instead place emphasis upon the book's substantial contributions and controversial points.
Foremost, this book represents a substantial and productive use of local archives in the study of Chinese legal history. Efforts of this sort can be traced back to the path-breaker Dai Yanhui, who during 1970s edited the Dan-Xin archives and offered depictions of the local administration of Taiwan in imperial China.1 Since then, David Buxbaum, Mark A. Allee, Madeleine Zelin, Philip C. C. Huang, Matthew Sommer, Malissa Macauley, Shiga Shuzo, Terada Hiroaki, Deng Jianpeng, and Wu Peilin, inter alios have carried out research about imperial Chinese law by utilizing legal archives in various counties such as Dan-Xin, Baodi, Ba, Zigong, Huangyan and Nanbu. The book under review here does much to reinforce this trend, in that it illustrates local civil justice by way of a maximized use of local case records, especially those of Baodi.
The author's contribution lies in both empirical research and constructive analysis. By examining the details of the civil lawsuit process, furnishing an array of case categories concerning land, debts and marriage, and explaining the bases of decision-making, she has taken up issues neglected by prior works. Her study demonstrates that civil transactions and affairs drew greater attention in the legislative and judicial processes of imperial government than had otherwise been recognized. It also does much to end the obsolete conception that civil disputes in imperial China were settled mostly through mediation in which a small number of civil rules played only a minor part.
The book also argues conclusively that Qing officials considered the absence of litigation to be ideal, anti-litigation to be educational, and lawsuits judicial. Liang's explanation of the consistency of the configuration of non-litigation, anti-litigation and final litigation is based upon a comprehensive account of legal thought and practice in traditional China....