Traditional Chinese law, including Qing law, was often criticized as being inapplicable in civil trials and it was often believed that the magistrate's court preferred mediation rather than decision-making. This volume challenges these views and repairs the distorted picture of Qing civil justice.
With a detailed analysis of the Qing law codes and of one hundred nineteenth-century case records from Baodi county, the volume examines much-debated issues such as the approach of Qing law to civil and criminal matters, punishment and mediation in civil trials, Confucius' preference for...