Introduction

This chapter briefly introduces the key questions of the book, provides an overview of the methodologies employed to answer those questions, and provides a summary of each chapter. Overall, this book will utilize both traditional received texts and archeologically excavated legal materials to ascertain, first, what socio-political conditions provided the rationale for the production of law in written form in the kingdom of Qin; and, second, to consider how the intended function of written law influenced the linguistic composition of legal statutes, as well as their physical construction. This book accomplishes this by applying a function and form approach to the study of excavated legal manuscripts from Qin. To understand the function ascribed to law by the Qin, I draw upon theories from Law and Society literature to illustrate the ways in which social and political changes influence legal changes, and how legal reforms can in turn be directed to elicit targeted social or political change. The received philosophical literature and traditional Chinese histories recording the socio-political milieu of Qin provide evidence with which we can reconstruct certain elements of these socio-legal processes. The addition of “new” sources of Qin law in the form of archeologically excavated legal manuscripts over the past 70 years allows us to further refine such reconstructions. With a clearer understanding of the role of law in Qin culture, I then turn my attention to the form of written laws by applying legal-linguistic methods to a codicological and compositional analysis of a corpus of legal documents from the tomb of a county-level Qin official discovered by archeologists in 1975 at Shuihudi. Such an approach allows me to demonstrate how the envisioned function of legal statutes directly influenced the linguistic composition and physical production of such legal texts. In this way, this book elucidates the role of writing in the conceptualization and composition of written law in Qin.