Law, Resources and Time-Space Constructing Internal Evolutionary Logic for Chinese Judiciary During the 19th Century

This book studies the judicial evolution of the Qing Dynasty. It sums up the changes from six major aspects: 

1. Banfang(??)emerged in the late Qianlong period; 2. The opening of capital appeals(??)early in Jiaqing’s reign; 3. The consular jurisdiction was established during Daoguang’s reign; 4. The execution on the spot (????)was started in Daoguang and Xianfeng periods; 5. The introduction of fashenju (???,a interrogatory court) happened during Tongzhi’s reign; 6. Late in Guangxu’s reign, banishment was abolished, and reforms were made for prisons. 

In the past, people did not have a comprehensive understanding of these big changes. From the perspective of legal culture,  scholars often criticize traditional Chinese law focuses on criminal law while ignores civil law in terms of legal culture, but this situation can be explained in part by the inadequate allocation of resources and authoritarian resources in traditional societies. Using a large number of archives and precious materials such as private notes that were not noticed by academics in the past, this book adopts the research path of new historical jurisprudence to explore the inner logic of judicial evolution in the Qing Dynasty, focusing on the triangular connection between legal rules, resources, and temporal and spatial constructions, which is an important contribution to the study of traditional Chinese law.

Zhang Shiming is a professor of law and doctoral supervisor, Renmin University, China. He won the special prize of the "13th Beijing Philosophy and Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award", the first prize of the third "Chinese Law Outstanding Achievement Award" of the Chinese Law Society, successively studied in the Max Planck Institute of Intellectual Property, Competition Law and Tax Law, the University of Freiburg in Germany, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study in the United States, and the University of Tokyo in Japan. He is the chief editor of "Economic Law and Legal Anthropology Research Series" (ten currently published books such as "Systemization and Methodology of Economic Law: New Developments in Competition Law", "The Philosophy of Economic Law", and "The Theory of Competition Law and Intellectual Property"). 

His personal representative monographs include "Law, Resources and the Construction of Time and Space: China from 1644 to 1945" (Originally published by Guangdong People's Publishing House, 2012 in Chinese) completed with 17 years of hard work and "Economic Law Theory Evolution Theory" "(Revised third Chinese edition), and so on.