Negotiating Justice: Local Adjudication and Social Change in Late Imperial China

FAIN: FT-56766-09

Yonglin Jiang
Bryn Mawr College (Bryn Mawr, PA 19010-2859)

The goal of this project is to finish my scholarly monograph on the dynamic process of negotiating local justice during the last century of Ming dynasty China (1368-1644). By employing a large body of little-explored late Ming local court records, this study examines how justice was achieved in local adjudication and how justice construction and social change affected each other. I argue that as creating agents, all adjudication participants--magistrates, litigants, and community members--together defined their socio-legal situations, blurred mechanism boundaries in the process of negotiation, and created "situated justice"--a contingent and particularistic legal result based on concrete circumstances. As the first English book that comprehensively studies the interaction between law and society in the late Ming based on local court records, this project contributes to the study of Chinese socio-legal history on both historical and theoretical levels.