Writing Chinese Laws: The Form and Function of Legal Statutes Found in the Qin Shuihudi Corpus.

• Author: Staack, Thies
• Position: Book review

Writing Chinese Laws: The Form and Function of Legal Statutes Found in the Qin Shuihudi Corpus. By ERNEST CALDWELL. Routledge Studies in Asian Law. New York: ROUTLEDGE, 2018. Pp. x + 202. $149.24 (cloth); $24.98 (e-book).

The book under review is a revised version of the author's PhD dissertation "Writing Chinese Laws: The Form and Function of Statutes in Qin Legal Culture" (Univ. of Chicago, 2014). Drawing on methods from sociolegal studies and legal linguistics, the author takes a form and function approach to the study of legal manuscripts from early imperial China. He argues that the form of extant Qin statutes--including codicological, paleographical, and textual features--is informed by their supposed function, as reconstructed from various sources on Qin legal thought. The book consists of two main parts, the former (chapters two and three) is mainly devoted to the function of written law in pre-imperial China more generally and in the kingdom of Qin specifically, the latter (chapters four and five) to the material and textual form of Qin legal statutes as represented by the manuscripts from Shuihudi tomb 11.

Drawing on several passages from the received Zuo zhuan, chapter two investigates the sociopolitical conditions that prompted the rise of written law in several kingdoms of pre-imperial China as well as the role ascribed to it. The author argues that at least a significant part of the elite deemed written law capable of increasing sociopolitical stability and control over both the aristocracy and the general population. This chapter was previously published under the title "Social Change and Written Law in Early China" in Law and History Review 32.1 (2012): 1-30.

Chapter three closes in on the role written law played in the kingdom and later empire of Qin. Starting with a description of sociopolitical problems akin to those in other pre-imperial kingdoms, the author employs received and excavated sources to illustrate the importance the Qin government attached to the written form more generally and to written law in particular. He considers Qin written law to have served as an administrative tool capable of controlling and standardizing official behavior and of maintaining the functioning of the government down to the local level.

The following two chapters investigate to what extent this assumed function of Qin written law affected the actual form of legal statutes. Chapter four is concerned with material aspects. From the...