Social power and legal culture

by Melissa Ann Macauley

Asserting that Litigation in Late imperial China was a form of documentary warfare, this book offers a social analysis of the men who composed legal documents for commoners and elites alike. Litigation masters - a broad category of legal facilitators ranging from professional plaintmasters to simple but literate men to whom people turned for assistance - emerge in this study as central players in many of the most scandalous cases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China. These cases reveal the power of scandal to shape entire categories of law in the popular and official imaginations.