| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Asia

Matthew H. Sommer. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China. (Law, Society, and Culture in China.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 413. $55.00.

During the last decade, an intellectual earthquake has rumbled through Chinese legal history. Aptly, its epicenter has been Los Angeles, where a number of scholars and graduate students in the history department at the University of California, Los Angeles—Matthew H. Sommer among them—have managed to shake the foundations of decades of received wisdom about Chinese law, particularly during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Whereas previous legal scholarship on Chinese law focused on criminal law, and the near absence of litigation in civil matters, thanks to this new scholarship we now know that civil law was also important, that ordinary people frequently sued on another, and that lively debates took place about the role of law in politics and society. In China, as in the West, law was used, abused, and contested. The idea of Chinese as nonlitigious "consensus-seekers" can be safely laid to rest. . . .

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