All Chinese litigants, including merchants with commercial disputes and peasants arguing about land use, had to squeeze their claims into the categories of the criminal laws. For those who took their cases to court, there must always have been a risk that they would find themselves being punished for a wrong, so most disputes probably never reached the magistrates. Disagreements over property, debts, contracts, and cases of minor fighting and assault were probably dealt with locally in the villages or in neighbourhoods, or by members of an ancestral lineage, in a pattern that continued into
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