As existing scholarship demonstrates, although the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) aimed to be a society “without litigation,” people understood the use of law and employed it to resolve various disputes in the local community. At the same time, a plethora of legal cases reveal that many parties chose alternative ways of airing their grievances rather than going directly to the local court. Centered on the eighteenth-century litigation over a case of attempted rape, this article examines the complex, multifaceted factors that influenced people's use of different strategies to appeal their justice at the local level. It asks what resources ordinary people in the late Chosŏn had in navigating legal conflicts, how they strategized over the choices they had, and why they finally exercised particular options when trying to win their cases. Investigating these questions, this article not only offers insights into the meaning of litigation that entailed strenuous document preparation to inscribe grievance, but also probes the impulses of individual actors in the legal terrain when attempting to achieve their goals through the dynamics of social interactions and existing resources in eighteenth-century Korea.

Chinese state and society underwent a profound change in the Former Han period. During the early years of the Former Han the exact nature of state and society was by no means clear, but by the end of this period, the broad outlines of the imperial system had been established for all subsequent Chinese history. The Ch'in Dynasty had indicated one direction, but its collapse had revived many of those elements present at the end of the third century B.C. which could logically have developed into a limited open society.