Dispute resolution in early China (221 BCE – 220 CE)

Abstract

This thesis examines dispute resolution in early China, focusing on the Qin and Han empires as a continuous early imperial period from 221 BCE to 220 CE. Drawing methodological inspiration from recent work on dispute resolution in Roman legal history, it asks what forms of dispute resolution can be seen in the surviving Qin–Han materials, and how they operated in practice.

This question is explored through three Han case studies. The Liu Wu case concerns a succession dispute at the highest level of the Western Han court, which later escalated into the assassination of high-ranking officials. Its transmitted narratives show how a major political and legal dispute was presented as moving through judicial investigation, ministerial persuasion, kinship pressure, and imperial decision-making, while later accounts gave greater prominence to Chunqiu principles and figures with a Confucian background. The Widow A case concerns a widow who remarried before her deceased husband had been buried and therefore faced a capital charge. The case shows how a seemingly straightforward statutory offence was redirected from local handling to central consultation, where Dong Zhongshu’s Chunqiu interpretation offered a way to resolve a legal and ethical impasse. The Amicable Settlement case concerns a local dispute over inherited land, preserved in an excavated Eastern Han administrative document from Changsha. It shows how a dispute that had passed through private negotiation entered official procedure and was then redirected, through local official intervention and the parties’ negotiated agreement, towards an Amicable Settlement embedded in official procedure.

Taken together, these cases suggest that Qin–Han dispute resolution was not governed by a single route of handling. Rather, disputes moved through different routes, including litigation, negotiation, and mediation-like intervention, and their outcomes depended on the interaction of participants, authorities, rules, and procedures.

Date of Award	2 Dec 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of St Andrews
Supervisor	Caroline Humfress (Supervisor) & Konrad Lawson (Supervisor)