| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Melissa Macauley. Social Power and Legal Culture: Litigation Masters in Late Imperial China. (Law, Society, and Culture in China.) Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 416. $55.00.

At a time when the media questions whether China is or can be governed by the rule of law, the evidence from history, carefully culled, is both welcome and timely. Melissa Macauley's book is a study of the development of legal, or perhaps one should say paralegal, professionals over the last three centuries in China. The subject is a challenging one, for although litigation masters in China probably engaged "primarily in fairly benign forms of legal facilitation" (p. 196), the portraits of their activities in Qing dynasty sources were almost universally negative, for at least three reasons. First was the long-standing Confucian preference for harmony over disputation, particularly legalistic dispute. As important, the activities of litigation masters were counter-hegemonic: that is, they often served to defend the interests of the weaker powers in disputes, widows confronting their husband's families, or the poor seeking redress against their creditors. Finally, litigation masters were blamed for the lengthening backlog of legal cases that afflicted territorial administrators, and fulminations against "litigation tricksters" became part of a long- standing discourse of administrative despair in imperial China.

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