Inside and outside China, it has been widely believed that in premodern China common people did not bring civil cases to magistrate's courts but settled them at the level of their clan, village or guild. However, David C. Buxbaum's research based on the Dan-Xin Archive and Shiga Shu¯zo¯'s study of legal memoranda show that people quite regularly turned to the magistrate's court to resolve civil disputes. During the Qing dynasty, legal cases were divided, not in civil or criminal terms, but according to how serious the offence was. The less-serious offences were civil cases that included disputes concerning marriage and inheritance, land and property, money and loans, and minor battery. Whereas the latter category, criminal cases in today's terms, were handled with the intention of maintaining legal stability, magistrates involved with civil cases tried to strike a reasonable balance by examining each case on an individual basis. However, how the law was applied to civil cases remains a subject for future research.