Who answered the law? Question-and-answer texts and the attribution of legal authority in Qin China and Rome

Abstract In the late third century BC, a minor Qin official who had spent his career in legal clerkships was buried with a manuscript that posed questions about the law and answered them. Within little more than a century, jurists in Republican Rome were beginning to circulate their answers to legal questions in written form. Each body of text can be read as making legal expertise available beyond face-to-face consultation, yet the two present their answers in opposite ways: the Qin answers carry no names, while the Roman answers are inseparable from the names of those who gave them. This article compares the Shuihudi manuscript known as Falü dawen ("Answers to Questions about the Law") with the surviving literary presentation of Roman juristic responsa as forms of legal writing, examining how each attributes its answers, frames its questions, cites authority, displays its reasoning, and records disagreement. The comparison establishes a consistent contrast: across the features examined, the Qin manuscript presents its answers with no answering person in view, framed in the language of the statutes and the practice of the courts, while the Roman genre presents its answers as the acts of authoritative persons. The article then argues, on the strength of the citation practices documented in each tradition, that these conventions of attribution were not a matter of indifference: each way of writing answers made a particular allocation of interpretive authority easier to sustain, centred on office in Qin, on the person of the jurist in Rome. The answering practices that later grew up within each tradition, the imperial rescript in Rome and the named statutory commentaries attributed to Han scholars in later sources, show that neither convention was a cultural essence: in both traditions, the form of legal answers varied with the institutional position of the answering voice.