Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgment

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Writing and Law in Late Imperial China: Crime, Conflict, and Judgment, edited by Robert E. Hegel and Katherine Carlitz. Asian Law Series, no. 18. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 2007. Pp. 343 + xv.

This volume, based on a conference held at Washington University, St. Louis, in 2003, consists of twelve chapters organized into four parts. It begins with an enlightening introduction, "Writing and the Law," by one of the editors, Robert E. Hegel. In it, he succinctly locates the project within the broader framework of the ongoing debates in scholarship in the West concerning the relationship between law and literature and law as literature and in the writing about law and society in Qing China, the latter a subject that has been explored extensively and with remarkable results in the last fifteen years or so, especially by Philip Huang and his students and associates.1 Hegel also provides an overview of the legal structures, procedures, and practices, and their representations in literature (drama and fiction) in late imperial China, to provide the necessary institutional and imaginative background for understanding the detailed studies that comprise the rest of the volume. This introduction makes for an excellent summary of the current state of the field of Qing legal studies and would be well worth reading by students and scholars even if they have no specific interest in the case studies examined in individual chapters of the book.

Part I, "Rhetoric and Persuasion," consists of four chapters, "Making a Case: Characterizing the Filial Son," by Maram Epstein; "Explaining the Shrew: Narratives of Spousal Violence and the Critique of Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Criminal Cases," by Janel Theiss; "Between Oral and Written Cultures: Buddhist Monks in Qing Legal Plaints," by Yasuhiko Karasawa; and "The Art of Persuasion in Literature and Law," by Robert E. Hegel. The first three of these chapters rely on close reading of case records to demonstrate how magistrates structured their narratives in ways to influence their superiors, including the emperor, and to justify their decisions. Epstein nicely shows how they used rhetorical techniques to claim that male defendants were emotionally subordinate to their parents, without wills of their own, resulting in the minimization of their agency, with the...