The history of legal system studies the occurrence, development, evolution and laws of law and related systemsscience。The narrow sense of legal history only focuses on the evolution of the law itself, while the broad sense of legal history covers a wide range, including the relationship with society in addition to the law itself, legal related systems and the implementation of the law.
Before the 1990s, domestic master's and doctoral programs were usually the subject points of legal history. However, with the end of the century and the arrival of the new century, all major universities and five major political and law universities (now four) recognized this problem, so they changed their master's programs into legal history, including Chinese legal history, foreign legal history (mainly western legal history)Chinese Traditional Legal Culture, Western Legal Thought History (andjurisprudenceCross) and so on.
However, the undergraduate teaching is still divided into Chinese legal history and foreign legal history;Is not calledLegal history。
Relevant schools
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Domestic legal history (legal history) disciplines are strong:
National societies includeChinese Law History Society, National Society of Foreign Legal History, Western Society of Legal Thought History, Comparative Law Society (Research Society) and other societies.
In 2008, the history of legal system was still one of the subjects with the lowest score. There were only two types of questions involved: single choice questions and multiple choice questions. Among them, single choice questions were from 8 to 11 and 13 of Volume I, with a total of 5 points, and multiple choice questions were from 57 to 59, with a total of 6 points.Legal history in 2008judicial examination A total of 11 points were scored in the judicial examination, which was the lowest score in the judicial examination in 2013.[1]
2013 Examination Outline
Chapter I History of Chinese Legal System
Section I Legal System from the Western Zhou Dynasty to the Qin, Han, Wei and Jin Dynasties
Section II Legal System from Tang and Song Dynasties to Ming and Qing Dynasties
Section III Legal System in the Late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China
Chapter II History of Foreign Legal System
Section 1 Roman Law
Section 2 Anglo American Legal System
Section 3 Civil Law System
Related research
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In the study of the legal history of the Qing Dynasty, prefecture and county archives have unique value compared with official history, local chronicles, genealogies, official proverbs, diaries and other historical materials.Making full use of state and county archives is not only an effort direction of legal history research, but also an important development trend.If used properly, researchers can obtain more vivid texts, and then may draw conclusions closer to the historical truth.
The Credibility of the Official History of the Qing Dynasty
Historical materials such as official history are mostly declarations of political power and ideology, which are not necessarily true records of historical facts.internationally known sinologistIt was once said that "the official letters of the Qing Dynasty may not be reliable" because the factual records "changed after learning the classics"（internationally known sinologist：《Liu Rushi's Biography》(bottom),Shanghai Classics Publishing House 1980 edition, page 882, 891), while the official script "has many taboos" (Chen Yinque: "True Records of Shun Zong and Continued Mysterious Records", published in《Jin Mingguan (second edition)》Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1980 edition, page 74).National laws and provincial cases are mostly the research materials of system history, which often cannot reflect the specific practice.Because of its own function of "exhortation and admonition", the "official proverbs" have the purpose of expressing the ideal "way of being an official" or "way of acting as a curtain". Even if the summary of official governance experience is operable, it may not be the true record of the author's behavior as an official, and it may not be verified at the practical level at that time.These, of course, cannot be, or at least cannot be, the first-hand materials for us to analyze the social reality at that time.
The lack of simplicity is the coexistence of local chronicles, genealogies and other materials.Limited by style and content, local chronicles tend to give a brief account of their major points. The lack of in-depth description results in unclear details and weak cause and effect.Documents such as genealogy usually cannot reflect the social reality between ethnic groups and outside the family, and because of its characteristics of "getting rich" and "getting rich", the records are often inaccurate.
State and County Judicial Archives
The judicial archives of prefectures and counties are quite different. The "richness" of their contents and the "infinity" of their implied information often give us a turning point when "mountains are poor and rivers are no longer in doubt". Their rich information will also enable researchers to experience the comfort and charm of "seeing mountains and rivers as peaks, and varying in distance and distance".A complete litigation file records the whole process from the beginning to the end. In this process, we can see the age, residence, family members, neighbors, economic status, social composition and many other information of the parties, as well as the attitude of various forces, such as county officials, Yamen runners, representatives, litigants, families, village conventions, Baojia, to the case.Not only that, because most of the complaints from ordinary people are trivial, we can roughly understand the daily life of people in rural society through archives.On the other hand, the local archives record mostly the "details" of ordinary people, and do not need to be transferred to trial level by level as the case of serious feelings, so the scribes who record these events usually do not need to spend time to revise and deliberately carve.
Of course, the records of state and county archives also fail to truthfully reflect the facts, and may even be fictional.Japanese scholar Yasuhiko Tang Ze once commented on the "Tan Xin Archives"《Ba County Archives》After careful text analysis of the litigation documents in the Nanling County Archives in Anhui Province, the conclusion is that all the officials and people involved in these documents make up or "make" the facts inadvertently or inadvertently.In particular, various procedural languages are closely related to the gains and losses, motivation, position, status and professional norms of file makers (such as parties, teachers, clerks, officials, etc.).Under the simple and conventional words, there are actually hidden secrets (Tang Zejingyan: Complaints and Their Producers in the Qing Dynasty, translated by Niu Jie, published in the Peking University Legal Review, Volume 10, Volume 1,Peking University Press2009).Therefore, the narration must not be directly regarded as "historical facts".But this problem is not insurmountable.The American historian Natalie Zemon Davis, in her book "Fiction in Archives: Forgiveness Stories and Storytellers in the Sixteenth Century French Judicial Archives", used the method of reconstructing the context to critically analyze a large number of "pardons" in the 16th century, thus exploring the various situations of the French world at that time.For researchers who use grass-roots archives, this is an attempt that can be used for reference. In addition, there were many prefecture and county archives in the Qing Dynasty with rich plots. If the research method was appropriate, researchers should be able to effectively avoid the "trap" in Kaizhou and county archives.
When using state and county archives, we should also have sufficient understanding of the shortcomings of archives preservation.Most of the existing archives are those of the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and few of them can be preserved before. Not only that, as far as the archives of prefectures and counties in the Qing Dynasty are concerned, the number of archives preserved in different periods is uneven, and most of them are concentrated in the late Qing Dynasty, especially in the Guangxu and Xuantong years. Moreover, the preservation of the same volume of archives is not necessarily complete.In this case, we can't generalize the facts of the whole Qing Dynasty based on the situation of the late Qing Dynasty, nor can we directly deduce the conclusion that the case was completed by "criticizing words" because there was no court order in a certain volume of files, and so on.Therefore, although the archives are highly original and reliable, if we do not put them into the known historical facts and use the handed down systematic documents to compare with them, our understanding and understanding of new historical materials will be greatly reduced, sometimes even unable to understand and understand, let alone use these new historical materials to study history.
In a word, the relationship among historical facts, historical writing and historical interpretation is complex.In the actual research, we emphasize the use of state and county archives, and can not exclude the reading and use of handed down literature. Only files and laws, codes, codes, official precepts, criminal cases, judicial precedent and other handed down literature, even includingGenealogy、inscriptions on a tabletOnly by combining literature materials, field survey materials, etc., can we have a more accurate understanding of the object to be studied, and the conclusions can be closer to the truth of history.[1]
