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Through close examination of case studies, this talk will explore how serious criminal cases were adjudicated and reviewed, how the Qing imperial government’s Confucian ideal and ideology of justice were constructed and sustained, and for those purposes, how judicial archives were created and curated in late imperial China. It will demonstrate the dynamics, tensions, and complexities in the imperial governance and judicial administration of Qing China (1644-1911).

Li Chen is currently Associate Professor of Chinese History and Law at the Department of History and the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto in Canada. He received his PhD in Chinese history from Columbia University and JD from the University of Illinois (UIUC). His research focuses on the intersections of law, politics, and culture in both Chinese and international history since the early 16th century. Besides other publications including two edited volumes and a forthcoming Chinese book, his first English monograph, "Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes: Sovereignty, Justice, and Transcultural Politics" (Columbia University Press, 2016), received the honorable mention for the Peter Gonville Stein Book Prize of the American Society for Legal History in 2017 and received the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Chinese studies from the Association for Asian Studies in 2018. He has since been working on several book projects on late imperial Chinese legal culture and judicial practices.