Classical Learning and the Law: Erudition as Persuasion in the Dragon Sinews, Phoenix Marrow Judgments of Zhang Zhuo

Tang literary judgments were essays written in the persona of an official resolving legal and administrative questions. They were an essential component of the civil service selection examination, whereby candidates holding nominal official status were appointed to actual posts in the bureaucracy. Zhang Zhuo’s Longjin fengsui pan (Dragon Sinews, Phoenix Marrow Judgments) is the earliest surviving collection of model judgment answers meant to aid candidates in preparing for the selection examinations. The judgments, composed in parallel prose of four and six syllables, are ornate and erudite, and rarely deal precisely with Tang formal law. This study goes beyond examining Zhang’s work from the perspective of the formal law by exploring how classical learning itself served as a persuasive force in the resolution of cases. I argue that the Longjin fengsui pan shows that the literati were well-versed in the formal law, but prized displays of erudition as a means of articulating the moral, rather than the technical, side of law.