S. Worthen | Weblog

Could be. I knew it might be just synonym, but I had a sudden fit of worry that there might be more than one version. After all, there's more than one kind of secular law too. (Specifically thinking of written vs. tradition in England.)

Reading further, this does make sense. I'm struck by the absence of reference to tradition or previous practice (even on the part of an individual congregation) in the "Presbyterian polity" entry though. (Not that canon law = tradition)

Herail's written on the administrative codes of the classical period in French, and there might be some stuff in German... I'll have to get back to you on it. That's for court law.

For estate suits, you have some translations in the collections by Jeffrey Mass for the Kamakura Bakufu (1185-1331), which operated in parallel with the court's decisions (although the customary law involving estates did have a certain amount of stability between court and bakufu). The Goseibai shikimoku has been translated, but that translation's a little dodgy in parts (journal article somewhere, I think)--that's a list of rules put out by the Kamakura Bakufu, and the succeeding Muromachi Bakufu's codes are translated in Laws of the Muromachi Bakufu (1981). The introduction of that, and the commentaries in Mass, are the most legally legal history I've seen.

The court codes (the ones based on the Tang ones) were penal and administrative--and I can't think of a particularly good source that covers them as a whole in English. Until fairly recently, in fact, the assumption had been that they were unimportant for medieval Japanese society. The scholar who's done the most to argue against that is the one who wrote up the shrine case I mentioned before. I think if there was a French or German translation of the ritsuryo ("penal/administrative"), I think I would have run across it, instead of seeing different translations in excerpts of books I read. But that's not the case.

There's some things here and there about criminal cases, but not that much that I can think of put together. Going from what Karl Friday says about the 10th century and also things later, it may be because aside from those that the court had direct control over--that is to say, its own members--all you could do is destroy/confiscate property or kill the suspect. When you could catch them. That probably needs further study--I have read an article on jurisdiction rights in criminal pursuits (estates were generally immune to official entry) for Kamakura's agents, but that was in Japanese again.

For the later medieval period--1450 until 1600 or so, David Eason's dissertation (UCLA, either 2006 or 2007 I think) would cover things, but that's all I'm aware of offhand. (1450-1800 is a gap in my advisors' expertise. Which means I'm better on Meiji [late 19th cen] law than Tokugawa [1600-1867] or Warring States).