Book XII 695
Inspector-General and the Board of Punishments, should be processed in
the Directorate for Adjudication of Slave Lawsuits.
“1. One who turns a person of commoner status into a slave by exer-
cising suppression, one who forcibly seizes the slaves from the weak and
helpless, one who forges documents that enslave another, one who continues
to hold slaves despite a court ruling to the contrary, one who keeps the
slaves entirely to himself and does not divide them up among the heirs, one
who keeps slaves omitted from the documents entirely to himself, one who
monopolizes slaves who are supposed to be divided among the heirs, and
one who permanently seizes slaves from the owner for a mortgage should be
allowed to negotiate with the other heirs before they bring their cases to
court.
“One who never sees his own fault and tries to manipulate the law and
confuse the judge by using all sorts of trickery should be reported to the
Two Departments and punished for disobeying the court ruling. Officials
who are below the rank of grand master for excellent goodness [rank 2b]
should be punished so that they can be made examples for posterity. The
most cunning among them should be deprived of their own slaves and their
slaves returned to the government. Law officials who adjudicate cases
according to their personal feelings or pay little attention to them, or liti-
gants who recklessly complain about the court ruling, shall all be reported
to the Office of the Inspector-General and punished severely.
“1. The adjudication of slave lawsuits in the provinces should be entrusted
to the governor of each province. The governor appoints three or four fair-
minded men of integrity in the province to serve as judges on his behalf and
distributes the lawsuits presented to him to those judges so that they can
adjudicate the lawsuits together. The judges issue written decisions and
later submit reports to the governor, explaining briefly which litigants were
right or wrong and writing their names and ages. If a judge makes a wrongful
decision and litigants lodge an appeal, the governor then reviews the docu-
ments of both sides; and if he finds that the decision is unmistakably flawed,
he severely punishes the judge responsible and has all the slaves owned by
him returned to the government.
“1. As for unsolved problems, we will continue to discuss them and imple-
ment solutions after submitting a report to you.”
The king said, “When you decide whether a man is a slave, one whose
record clearly shows his slave status should be made a slave, and one whose
record is ambiguous should be made a man of good status. Nevertheless, the