Explain the overall history of the Qin from textbook or from the lecture.

Topic:
Reevaluation of the Qin society using the legal documents.

Mechanism:
We have read selections from Qin legal documents, and practices to make hypotheses using the sources. In this paper, students need to evaluate the Qin society or the Qin legal system based on the given legal documents. As you practiced with the worksheet for the last unit, find (at least) three aspects of the Qin society, and use the legal documents as the evidence to support your hypotheses or arguments. For this paper, you can assume that your readers have the basic knowledge on the Qin society. Therefore, you do not have to explain the overall history of the Qin from textbook or from the lecture. (You may briefly mention about the Qin in the introduction if you need.) The main focus of this paper should be the analysis of the legal documents to reevaluate the Qin society. If you have clear and strong evidence from the documents, you can make arguments that are against what we have generally believed. For example, you may argue that the “Qin society had good welfare system” if you can show the evidence from the legal documents. Find at least three aspects of the society from the legal documents, and use these three (or more) aspects to support your thesis, which should be written in one sentence at the end of the introduction paragraph.

For example, Your thesis can be about the “effectiveness of the Qin legal system” (of course, you should write a full sentence for your thesis statement clearly indicating whether you think ‘it was effective’ or ‘it was not effective’.) Then, the thee supporting points should be explained with details as analyzing the legal sources. If you want to make a thesis as “The Qin had effective legal system”, one of supporting points can be “Qin’s punishment system was designed to prevent crimes”. You should use the detailed legal codes and analyze them to support this point. Find at least three detailed evidence from the legal documents. The diagram below will show the structure of the paper I recommend.

Use Chicago style citation format to indicate the source using footnotes. Footnotes should be written on the bottom of the page where you use the source. Search Chicago Style Citation formats for footnotes if you are not familiar with it, and use the correct format for this paper.

Last Completed Projects