Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China PDF Download

Author: Philip C. Huang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804741115
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new.

Author:
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779279
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
The opening of local archives to Western scholars in the 1980's has provided the basis for this reexamination of civil law in Qing and Republican China. This pathbreaking volume demonstrates that, contrary to previous scholarly understanding, Qing and Republican courts dealt extensively with such civil matters as land rights, debt, marriage, and inheritance, and did so with striking consistency and in conformity with the written code.

Author: Philip C. C. Huang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804734691
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
To what extent do newly available case records bear out our conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system? Is it true, for example, that Qing courts rarely handled civil lawsuits--those concerned with disputes over land, debt, marriage, and inheritance--as official Qing representations led us to believe? Is it true that decent people did not use the courts? And is it true that magistrates generally relied more on moral predilections than on codified law in dealing with cases? Based in large part on records of 628 civil dispute cases from three counties from the 1760’s to the 1900’s, this book reexamines those widely accepted Qing representations in the light of actual practice. The Qing state would have had us believe that civil disputes were so "minor” or "trivial” that they were left largely to local residents themselves to resolve. However, case records show that such disputes actually made up a major part of the caseloads of local courts. The Qing state held that lawsuits were the result of actions of immoral men, but ethnographic information and case records reveal that when community/kin mediation failed, many common peasants resorted to the courts to assert and protect their legitimate claims. The Qing state would have had us believe that local magistrates, when they did deal with civil disputes, did so as mediators rather than judges. Actual records reveal that magistrates almost never engaged in mediation but generally adjudicated according to stipulations in the Qing code.

Author: Stanley B. Lubman
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804743785
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This book analyzes the principal legal institutions that have emerged in China and considers implications for U.S. policy of the limits on China's ability to develop meaningful legal institutions.

Author: Neil Jeffrey Diamant
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804750486
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
This book explores legal mobilization, culture, and institutions in contemporary China from a perspective informed by 'law and society' scholarship.

Author: William P. Alford
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804729603
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
This sweeping study examines the law of intellectual property in Chinese civilization from imperial days to the present. It uses materials drawn from law, the arts and other fields as well as extensive interviews with Chinese and foreign officials, business people, lawyers, and perpetrators and victims of "piracy."

Author: Matthew Harvey Sommer
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804745595
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description
This study of the regulation of sexuality in the Qing dynasty explores the social context for sexual behavior criminalized by the state, showing how regulation shifted away from status to a new regime of gender that mandated a uniform standard of sexual morality and criminal liability for all people, regardless of their social status.

Author: Kathryn Bernhardt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804735278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Drawing on newly available archival case records, this book demonstrates that Chinese women's rights to property changed substantially from the Song through the Qing dynasties, and even more dramatically under the Republican Civil Code of 1929-30.

Author: Bradly W. Reed
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804779953
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
For commoners in the Qing dynasty, the most salient agents of the imperial state were not the emperor's appointed officials but rather the clerks and runners of the county yamen, the lowest level of functionaries in the Qing state's administrative hierarchy. Yet until now we have known very little about these critically important persons beyond the caricatured portrayals of corruption and venality left by Qing high officials and elites. Drawing from the rich archival records of Ba county, Sichuan, the author challenges the simplicity of these portrayals by taking us inside the county yamen to provide the first detailed look at local administrative practice from the perspective of those who actually carried it out. Who were the county clerks and runners? How were they recruited, organized, disciplined, and rewarded? What was the economic basis for a career in the yamen? How did clerks and runners view themselves as well as legitimize their role in Qing government? And what impact did their interests and practices have on symbolically laden elements of imperial government such as the magistrate's court? In addressing these questions, the author traverses the disjuncture between statutory regulations and the realities of daily administrative practice, uncovering a realm of informal, semiautonomous, yet highly structured and even rationalized procedures. Although frequently in violation of formal law, this extra-statutory system nevertheless remained an irreducible component of local government under the Qing. Recognizing the centrality of such informal practice to yamen administration forces us to rethink not only traditional assumptions concerning local corruption in the Qing, but also the ways in which we conceptualize the boundaries between state and society in late imperial China.

Author: Madeleine Zelin
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804766940
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Providing a new perspective on economic and legal institutions, particularly on contract and property, in Qing and Republican history, this volume provides case studies to explicate how these institutions worked, while situating them firmly in their broader social context.