In this original and thought-provoking study of Chosŏn Korea's legal practices, Jisoo M. Kim offers a multilayered analysis of petitions submitted by women of both elite and non-elite status throughout the dynasty. Focusing on the role of gender and status in petitioning and the language of legal performance, three main arguments are presented: First, despite the common understanding of the patriarchal Confucian sociopolitical order of Chosŏn Korea, the legal system allowed women a legal voice and women actively made use of this right to protect themselves and their families. Second, the Confucian dictate that the state should ensure that the people did not experience grievances gave a legal voice to non-elites, women, and other vulnerable members of society. Third, given this emphasis on grievances in legal culture, legal performance mainly centered on the expression of the emotion of wŏn, a term often translated as “injustice” or “grievance.” Providing a fuller understanding of this notion, Kim maintains that “[n]egative emotions such as vengeance, hatred, anger, grief, remorse, and pain were merged into a single emotion known as wŏn” (p. 7).
Chapter 1 provides the institutional background for these petitions through a discussion of the textual legal framework and the channels for submitting petitions, in particular the possibility of addressing these directly to the king through the “petition drum” (sinmun'go) and the recognized right to approach the king with grievances during royal processions. Kim argues that such channels enabling the people to display emotions of wŏn directly to the ruler were “critical in reinforcing the legitimacy of the sovereign through his performance of royal justice” (p. 20).
Chapter 2 moves on to the legal performance surrounding the submission of these petitions, providing illuminating discussions on gender, written and oral petitions, and the use of either Classical Chinese or vernacular Korean in legal contexts. Here the argument is made that the practice of women to use vernacular Korean for not only oral but also written petitions made this language “visible in the legal writing of the late Chosŏn period” (p. 72).
From Chapter 3 the narration shifts from form to content. This chapter compares the narrative strategies used by men and women. Whereas both genders made use of wŏn, women often described it in terms of pain but men in terms of anger. Women appropriated the Confucian rhetoric of female virtue in seeking their interests, it is argued, and Kim draws the conclusion that gender played a more important role than status in presenting legal grievances.
Having successfully shown how women employed notions of female virtue and weakness when protecting their interests through petitions, in the following two chapters Kim discusses cases where women submitted petitions on behalf of family members. In early Chosŏn the legal system only allowed people to submit petitions on issues related to their own person, but given the Confucianization of society, in the eighteenth century the state made it legal for sons, wives, younger brothers, and slaves to petition on behalf of fathers, husbands, elder brothers, and masters. An interesting argument made in the book is that popular legal practices helped shape the legal system. The point made in this section of the book is that “as people increasingly appealed to relieve the wŏn they felt through sympathy with their family members, the state eventually came to recognize the practice of appealing on other's behalf” (p. 120).
The Emotions of Justice is most convincing in the arguments related to gender and the discussion on the role of emotions in the legal system, enriching our understanding of the relationship between law, gender, emotions, and language. In particular the focus on linguistic performance and the importance of emotions in legal argumentation provides crucial insights into legal practices of the period. Unfortunately, the arguments on social status are less convincing. While the individual petitions by commoners or slaves introduced in the study provide interesting insights into social status and legal practices, the sources—or maybe the selection of petitions—unfortunately do not seem to sufficiently corroborate the often repeated claim that the non-elite challenged elites by filing complaints against them. It would have been useful if the book provided a more comprehensive picture of the content of these petitions and the social status of the people involved. Also, the fact that women and non-elites could submit petitions does not seem to be a sufficient basis for the argument that “different genders and statuses” were “equally recognized legal subjects” (p. 6), given how the law texts in most aspects strictly differentiated between social status groups and genders. A final, minor, criticism is that the text at times tends to be repetitive—providing the same background information and making the same arguments in each chapter—despite its rather short format.
These few points of criticism, however, do not detract from the importance of the book. It not only is a valuable contribution to the fields of Korean legal and gender history, but also provides a useful framework for analyzing and understanding the role of emotions in the Confucian cultural and sociopolitical environment of Chosŏn Korea. The Emotions of Justice will be a crucial text when teaching this period in Korean history and should attract a wide interest also from scholars of cognate disciplines.
