TY - JOUR
AU1 - Leonard, Jane Kate
AB -  Reviews 511 Melissa Macauley. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xx, 416 pp. Hardcover $55.00, ISBN 0­8047­3135­7. Melissa Macauley's Social Power and Legal Culture examines the changing role of litigation masters in late imperial China in order to show how law and legal culture shed light on social and economic change and on the parallel evolution of the mentalities and culture that accompany change. The book looks at this issue in broad historical-legal perspective and draws on an impressive range of official archival and printed sources, legal codes, cases, and official handbooks, as well as different literary genres. Moreover, the author explores the relevance to her project of various theoretical models and interpretive insights, some of them comparative, and she has drawn on them selectively to produce an imaginative, multilayered interpretive framework for the study of legal culture in the late imperial period. The author argues that the litigation master has been a problematic figure in Chinese history since the early empire because the very act of litigation was itself contentious. As such, it challenged the Confucian ideal of social harmony, and it undermined the Confucian approach to 
TI - Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China (review)
JF - China Review International
DA - 2000-09-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/university-of-hawai-i-press/social-power-and-legal-culture-litigation-masters-in-late-imperial-dPHBYSFMt0
SP - 511
EP - 516
VL - 7
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -