This article examines the empire-wide legal professional community that emerged for the first time in Chinese history during the Qing period (1644–1911). By analyzing a wide range of archival records and primary sources, this study provides valuable insights into the dynamic configurations of late imperial China’s legal culture and juridical field, as well as the thousands of legal specialists who shaped them. The findings challenge much of the received wisdom about late imperial China, which has too often been assumed as a Confucian society that discouraged the use of law and legal expertise and was therefore unlikely to have witnessed so many Confucian literati becoming legal specialists, both within and outside the judicial system.

This article examines China’s first women’s prison in the context of diplomatic disputes, legal reforms, and gender order at the turn of the twentieth century. It shows that the custody of female offenders in the Shanghai International Settlement became a battleground in which the interests and perceptions of late imperial China and the Western authorities clashed. Under pressure from the Western authorities, the first Chinese women’s prison was established in 1907, even prior to the formal introduction of custodial sentences into China’s criminal code. Notably, the Chinese officials did not embrace prison as a more benevolent punitive institution; rather, they saw it more as a tool to consolidate its judicial sovereignty and preserve gender norms. For Chinese women, the prison, functioning as a re-cloistered feminine space, further entrenched the confinement of their bodies, thereby perpetuating rather than changing orthodox values of female chastity. This article questions the universal modernity of European penalties by pointing out that the introduction of imprisonment as a supposedly more civilized and humane form of punishment may have placed Chinese women at a greater disadvantage.

As ancient China and Rome transformed into empires, both states showed an increasing interest in regulating family ethics and individuals’ sexuality. Using excavated documents and transmitted texts, this article compares legal statutes and practices against illicit consensual sex in early imperial China (221 BCE–220 CE) with those in the Roman empire. On the one hand, both legal systems aimed at consolidating social hierarchies based on gender, status, and generation. On the other, the Roman and Chinese statutes had different emphases due to their respective political, social, and cultural contexts, and the actual penalties for adultery and incest differed significantly from those prescribed in the statutes. In both empires, control over individuals’ sexuality facilitated state power’s penetration into the family during empire-building, giving rise to laws in areas that had been largely left to customs and individual will.

This paper provides a detailed exploration of the sale of offices in China and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In France, the sale of offices became deeply integrated into the officialdom, effectively serving as a formal institution. It was a part of the financial framework and contributed to the operation of the bureaucracy. However, this practice led to public dissatisfaction due to concerns about the fairness of the judicial system. Conversely, in China, the sale of offices was less formalized and more directly associated with corruption due to the close connection with informal income and the challenge to the formal system of imperial civil examinations. It was considered an ad hoc, informal, and pragmatic solution to financial emergencies. The sale of offices, in a different context, was seen as having both positive and negative aspects, with its impact varying, depending on the specific function it served.

Free speech scholars have been preoccupied with laws, regulations, judicial opinions, and other traditional “legal” materials. However, this article examines an often-overlooked object in at least studying China’s speech rights—the ideological and cultural policy of the party-state. The party-state’s ideological and cultural policy has not only, for better or worse, profoundly shaped speech rights in China; and more significantly and paradoxically, it also contains the seed that might promote China’s speech rights in the future. The party-state has had a long and deep-rooted tradition of promoting a democratic culture; by tracing the development of this tradition from the 1940s to the 2000s, this article argues that it may provide a new context and angle for thinking about people’s right to cultural construction and perhaps free speech in general in China.

The consumption of shaojiu or distilled liquor played a significant role in Qing legal culture and contributed to a rise in alcohol-related crimes. Qing officials’ attitudes towards intoxication not only influenced their judgments on many cases, but also reflected important trends of popular beliefs, notions, and practices that constituted shared knowledge and feelings between ordinary people and judges. This paper examines the transformation of Qing judicial practices and concerns regarding alcohol intoxication and crimes, arguing that specific cultural value and ideas that underpinned the public configuration of drinking behaviour during the Qing period contributed to a social pathology around intoxication. Due to the lack of a consistent interpretation of the effects of alcohol on the mind, early Qing officials tended to be lenient towards intoxicated offenders. However, mid-Qing law-makers and rulers recognized the serious administrative concerns associated with heavy drinking and began to conceptualize it as a serious social problem.

Drawing on recent jurisprudential literature that emphasizes the role and function performed by obligation, this article examines how the ethical doctrine of informed consent has been implemented in the context of health-care reforms in China. It argues that, while the Chinese incorporation of informed consent has sought to empower patients, the major medical laws and social policies fail to instantiate the obligations. Along with this failure, the Chinese medical laws have also failed to secure the bond of trust between them. This article also points out that a rounded analysis of the implementation of informed consent in China must take into account the obligation and function of the major components of the health-care delivery system other than physicians and hospitals, such as health-care insurance schemes.