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...