Abstract: The valuable documents of three cases excavated from Juyan, that is, “Kou En Case”, “Zhao Xuan Case” and the “Dead Foal Case”, are crucial for the study on civil litigation in the Han Dynasty. However, it has always been controversial in their interpretations: Does “Kou En Case” show that the Han government tended to penalize civil affairs? Why the repayment demanded in “Zhao Xuan Case” did not match the debts? And what is the nature of the sentence in the “Dead Foal Case”? With a thorough analysis of the bamboo slips of Juyan in the Han Dynasty and a comparative study of similar cases, we find that the Han government did not tend to penalize civil affairs, the mismatching of the repayment and debts in “Zhao Xuan Case” is a false impression caused by the wrong estimation of times of dun for debts, and the sentence of the “Dead Foal Case” is mainly civil in nature. Furthermore, we can discern the noticeable features of civil litigation in the Han Dynasty in the light of The Statutes and Ordinances of the Second Year excavated from Zhangjiashan, Hubei Province. These features show that civil litigation was obviously different from criminal litigation, and civil litigation had entered the advanced stage of being heard according to the law.

Key words: the Han Dynasty, Juyan cases, civil litigation, Hulsewé