Legal Specialization in Late Ming China: Competing Trends and Discourses

The late Ming period (sixteenth to the early seventeenth century) was a crucial phase in the continued specialization of legal roles and the early stages of legal professionalization. This unfolded amidst a complex and often negative derogatory discourse surrounding legal practitioners—particularly the so-called “litigation masters” or pettifoggers—whom elite writers frequently associated with moral corruption, excessive litigiousness, and social disorder. Two opposing trends shaped the new discourse. First, officials sought to position themselves as Confucian legal authorities in contrast to commoner-born administrators such as legal advisors, reinforcing an ideological distinction between moralized governance and pragmatic legal execution. Second, the expanding ecology of legal information saw technical methods of litigation becoming commonplace knowledge, reshaping the access to and application of law.

Since the Song dynasty, magistrates had increasingly relied on clerks and litigation specialists, marking an early division of labor in local administration. This trend intensified in the late Ming, as magistrates found experienced legal advisors and clerks became indispensable. Often possessing greater practical legal knowledge than the magistrates they served, litigation specialists further systematized legal knowledge, making legal expertise more accessible to commoners and codifying procedures through widely circulated manuals. The late Ming publishing boom facilitated the spread of various texts, embedding technical legal knowledge into broader governing practice. These texts are the main sources of this paper: litigation manuals, encyclopedias, casebooks, anthologies, and other sources related to local court operations. Although the specialization of legal knowledge and practices did not produce a fully professionalized legal class akin to modern judges and lawyers, they laid the foundation for legal expertise to emerge as a specialized domain, gradually distinguishing legal administration as a distinct form of statecraft rather than a subsidiary function of governance.