In Pursuit of Truth and Justice: The State of the Field of Chosŏn Legal History

Abstract

In Pursuit of Truth and Justice:The State of the Field of Chosŏn Legal History Kang Hyeok Hweon (bio) On a sweltering summer day in 1867, the magistrate of Chunghwa County in Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910) began a special investigation into the rumored murder of an unnamed woman, the mother of Kim Chiryong and his two brothers.1 Suspecting a concealed murder, he gathered witnesses in situ and interrogated their complicity. The Kim brothers, the story goes, were itinerant “singing boys” (ch’angdong 唱童) who had found temporary lodging in a remote village. One night, they faced a local ruffian named Yun Myŏngp’ae who drunkenly demanded their performance and quarreled with their elderly, ailing mother. The next morning, the mother passed. Despite the investigation, the cause of Mrs. Kim’s death was elusive. Suspiciously, the village leaders did not report it to authorities, and by the time the magistrate had begun probing, long gone were the brothers and the body of the deceased. While “truth” remained at large, “justice” was administered regardless. Despite escaping murder charges, Yun was imprisoned for ruffian behavior while other “disorderly elements” (nanyu 亂類) in town received beatings. This case, as recounted in the inquest records of Chunghwa County, [End Page 219] poses various questions: without plaintiffs and a confident “truth,” how and why was “justice” administered in the village? How did the performance of justice relate to local governance and its aims at maintaining social order? What was the logic of Chosŏn legal practice? Answers to these questions in turn funnel out to the booming field of legal and socio-legal history in Chosŏn studies. Publications on Chosŏn’s legal system have burgeoned during the last decade. In Korean scholarship, Chŏng Kŭngsik and Hong Sunmin probed proliferation patterns of legal texts and revisited Chosŏn’s evolving “rule of law” as manifestations of royal power and personality.2 Complementing the study of legal governance, scholars such as Kim Ho and Sim Chaeu discovered inquest records as important materials for examining social structure and mentalité in the late Chosŏn.3 Starting in 2012, Western academia also bustled with successive publications on legal history.4 Articles by Anders Karlsson, for [End Page 220] instance, studied the relations between penal law and governance, arguing that after the seventeenth century the Chosŏn deployed corporal and capital punishment in response to changing demographics and border situations. Draconian punishment, as shown, constituted a crucial “supplement to sagacious kingship and Confucian statecraft” and continued into the late Chosŏn despite reforms and debates about the relative role of penal rectification and moral edification in judiciary practice.5 Importantly, Karlsson revisits the legal arena as a site of ideology construction, and examines the role of body politics in Chosŏn’s mode of governance and power production. Due to space constraints, this review essay focuses on American historiography, specifically on two book-length studies with particular attention to their methodology and historiographical niche. Namely, three scholars sharing the surname of Kim—Sun Joo Kim, Jungwon Kim, and Jisoo Kim—have advanced the field of Chosŏn legal history by probing how non-elites and women exercised agency as full legal subjects in premodern Korea. Collectively, they explore the underlying logic of Chosŏn’s judicial system, and clarify the role of status and gender in legal practice. Within Western academia, they also complement William Shaw’s pioneering work, which revealed the complex practice of criminal law in the late Chosŏn: continuing Shaw’s spirit, they dispel any lingering myth that the dynasty ruled only by moral suasion rather than law.6 The impact of this sub-disciplinary boom also percolates outside the confines of legal history. It constitutes a methodological intervention against the Great Tradition school of Chosŏn history,7 which stressed the overarching [End Page 221] impact of ideology and the educated elite, and assumed that Neo-Confucianism defined the Chosŏn state and society in toto. Instead of gazing at the dynasty from the top, the three Kims underscore instead the varied, microscopic realities of the marginalized, as reflected in their use of primary sources such as inquest records and...