Includes bibliographical references.

Preliminary Material -- Editor’s Introduction / Philip C. C. Huang -- 1 The History-of-Practice Approach to Studying Chinese Law (Introduction to Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present) / Philip C. C. Huang -- 2 Women and Property in China, 960–1949, Introduction and Conclusion / Kathryn Bernhardt -- 3 Illicit Bureaucrats / Bradly W. Reed -- 4 From Oral Testimony to Written Records in Qing Legal Cases / Yasuhiko Karasawa -- 5 Abortion in Late Imperial China: Routine Birth Control or Crisis Intervention? / Matthew H. Sommer -- 6 Customary and Judicial Practices as Seen in Criminal Sales of Land in Qing Manchuria / Christopher Isett -- 7 Guoshi Killing: The Continuum of Criminal Intent in Qing and Republican China / Jennifer M. Neighbors -- 8 Between the State and the Village: Land Taxation and “Substantive Governance” in Traditional China / Huaiyin Li -- 9 Village-State Cooperation: Modern Community Schools and Their Funding, Haicheng County, Fengtian, 1905–1931 / Elizabeth VanderVen -- 10 Power Networks and State-Society Relations in Republican China / Danny Hsu -- 11 Ceremony and the Definition of Marriage under Republican Law / Lisa Tran -- 12 Spousal Abuse: Divorce Litigation and the Emergence of Rights Consciousness in Republican China / Margaret Kuo -- 13 Law, Gongqin, and Transnational Polygamy: Family Matters in Fujian and British Malaya, 1855–1942 / Huey Bin Teng -- 14 Centralized Minimalism: Semiformal Governance by Quasi-Officials and Dispute Resolution in China / Philip C. C. Huang -- 15 Court Mediation in China, Past and Present / Philip C. C. Huang -- 16 How a “New Legal History” Might Be Possible: Recent Trends in Chinese Legal History Studies in the United States and Their Implications.

Legal history studies have often focused mainly on codified law, without attention to actual practice, and on the past, without relating it to the present. As the title— Research from Archival Case Records: Law, Society, and Culture in China —of this book suggests, the authors deliberately follow the research method of starting from court actions and only on that basis engage in discussions of laws and legal concepts and theory. The articles cover a range of topics and source materials, both past and present. They provide some surprising findings—about disjunctures between code and practice, adjustments between them, and how those reveal operative principles and logics different from what the legal texts alone might suggest. Contributors are: Kathryn Bernhardt, Danny Hsu, Philip C. C. Huang, Christopher Isett, Yasuhiko Karasawa, Margaret Kuo, Huaiyin Li, Jennifer M. Neighbors, Bradly W. Reed, Matthew H. Sommer, Huey Bin Teng, Lisa Tran, Elizabeth VanderVen, and Chenjun You.