Conception Of Law

Legalists are in favor of an authoritarian state that is ruled by force. It claims that the supreme ruler is much more important than the ruled and that individuals must conform to standards of the authority. During the Qin Dynasty, which ruled China from 221 B.C.E. to 207 B.C.E, Qin Shi Huangdi was able to unite China after the Warring States Period by adopting legalism as a ruling philosophy. “Qin Shi Huangdi was a brutal ruler of China, but effective

During the Warring Sates Period there were three main philosophies in china, that influenced their actions and way of thinking. The three perspectives were Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism. For each there was a social thoughts, political thoughts, ethical teachings, and a way of public life. These three philosophies where created because of the political fragmentation. (McKay,Pg.70)

Legalism was founded by Han Fei 280-233 Bce. Legalist proposed that humans beings were evil by nature. Legalists wanted a rigid system of laws and punishments. The law keeps people from doing wrong things. The ideal ruler would be a powerful, uncompassionate dictator. A legalist writer wrote “ To govern the state by law is to praise the right and blame the wrong”{Document 5}. A ruler should deal with his subjects by expecting them to obey and follow the laws of the

In both China and the United States, the judicial system is composed of courts that contain several different levels. However, there is a basic structural difference between the Chinese and American legal systems. In America, the three branches of government are supposed to be separate, so that the court system is supposed to be beyond party politics and partisan antics. This separate system of checks and balances does not exist in China. On the contrary, the judicial branch is not independent. It is meant as an extension of the government, and therefore of the single political party with any power in China. The distinction between American judicial independence and Chinese judicial dependence may be one of the most critical differences between the two systems because the American judicial branch is meant to act as a check and balance with the other systems, while China's three-part system has the same branches but lacks the same independence.

The legal culture is a national, regional or national basis in certain social and material conditions, the state power by the creation of a common legal system constraints and determine the status of the legal system of values and attitudes in the whole society and culture. Thus, each country has its own unique legal culture. By selecting the most typical American and Chinese legal cultures of two different aspects: the legal standard, comparative analysis of legal values, and to explore the reasons for this difference, so that we not only recognize the legal and cultural differences between the two countries, but also to see their outstanding achievements and shortcomings of legal culture.

Masters Mozi and Laozi are two famous philosophers from the Warring States Period; however, their theories about how to govern a state are opposed. Master Mozi advocates for impartial caring and non-offence in the application of enforceable rules, while Master Laozi favors “trying not to try”. In this paper, I will analyze these two Chinese philosophers’ ideas regarding solutions to crime. This analysis will include a brief comparison and comments on their thoughts.

In China during 406-221 BCE, the battling states between the Zhou and the Han Dynasties? were in a state of governmental disorder. Although the era was in a disruptive state, it ushered in a cultural opening that left a long lasting imprint on the Chinese history. As a result, three major belief systems surfaced Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism in an attempt to achieve a sense of political order in a disorder period. There are distinctions in the way each of the belief systems approached the many problems that plagued the Chinese society. First, all of the founders were contemporaries in China. As well as considered philosophies, who studied the future, and sat out to focus on the present rather than the past. In contrast, Confucianism, Daoism and Legalism established various paths in search of an optimistic future for the success of China. Second, both Legalism and Confucianism developed a social belief system, but are considered a religion. However, both Legalism and Confucianism purpose was to create an orderly society in the hopes of prosperity. In contrast, Daoism does

Law is present in all civilizations and is a complex system that is used for dispute and conflict resolution. Law is a characterization of all societies which can then be analyzed in terms of variables such as formalization, whether it is legislated or discovered, and whether the institutional framework is embedded or specialized (Magagna 2014). The idea that any government that has ever existed has been lawless is clearly false. The components of law in any society can be very complex. The degree of formalization is a very key integral part of law in that any written or quantified law is considered to be more certain and predictable than oral law. There is a degree of variation between written and oral legalizations in the justice system. There is an even larger difference between legislated law and law that is viewed as something discovered, known as customary law. Legislative law is more likely to change in response to social and economic conditions. Customary law does change, but more slowly and because it is not written down, it is more difficult to replace or change (Magagna 2014). In a system of law there is also a specific degree of specialization, whether its judges or lawyers or if its customary leaders such as village officials or the district magistrate, which is present in East Asia.

In “Constructing the Chinese Empire”, Professor Scarlett stated that within a legalistic state, the government was run by a strict adherence to the law and that law was “the will of the whole state”. It follows that the emperors duty is to make sure the law is followed. The emperor must rule severely, carrying out the law in the harshest manner, quickly and with a great show of force. (“Three Chinese Philosophies”: 140) The emperor may be a “nice” person, but he also cannot show mercy when judging an offense, rather he must always execute the punishment exactly as it is written. (TCP: 132) He also needs to make sure that the penalties for breaking the law are extreme enough to deter future criminals. If he does these things properly, his

Historically, these two countries were governed by very central regimes: the tsarist tyranny in Russia and the heavenly mandated2 dynasticism in China. As time progressed, these regimes underwent periods of revolution, flushing out the old-world demagoguery and redirecting the source of legitimacy. Legitimacy can be defined as the right to rule through determination by the citizens of a country.3 In China and Russia (and most countries in today’s word for that matter), a system of rational-legal legitimacy is in place. This is a system based on the rule of law, a principle divided into two forms: common and code law. For the sake of this comparison, we will be focusing on the latter; a legal system based on written, pre-established

Legalism is based on a document titled “The Writings of Master Han Fei” that was written by Han Fei. Han Fei was a prince in the Han state of China. He was schooled with Confucian ideas and principles, but would reject them to create a more lawful society. Since he was a prince, he had a high social status and was in line for the throne of the state of Han after his father would pass. This gave him an advantage to implement his legalist ideas into the government because he would soon be ruler of Han. As the ruler, he would not be told that the legalist way of life was wrong so he would get what he wanted. He believed that the “Way of Law” was better than the “Moral Way” (“The Writings of Master Han Fei”). This document was written to

The rule of law is a difficult concept to grasp and proves elusive to substantive definition. However, the following work considers the attempts of various social and legal theorists to define the concept and pertinent authorities are considered. Attitudes and emphasis as to the exact shape, form and content of the rule of law differ quite widely depending on the socio-political perspective and views of respective commentators (Slapper and Kelly, 2009, p16), although there are common themes that are almost universally adopted. The conclusions to this work endeavour to consolidate thinking on the rule of law in order to address the question posed in the title, which is at first sight a deceptively simple one.

The government of a country has been understood to be of vital importance for purposes of stability, responsibility, and accountability of the nation. China’s government is no less different from this important context. With the complex structure of China’s government, scholars have argued that the government’s function, with its high favorability rate, is an interesting dynamic that no other country possesses. Although there are many functions that a government should be fulfilling, Teresa Wright, in her book, Party and State in Post-Mao China, examines how China is able to satisfy basic functions of government that she argues is of importance. Wright explains that specific government features have influenced its ability to fulfill their governmental functions. As Wright argues, the main focus of this paper shall be to examine China and its ability in addressing public grievances with emphasis on administrative law. Specifically, the paper shall attempt to answer whether or not the Chinese government is adequately attempting to address public grievances. The aim of this paper is not to argue whether or not administrative law is successful in comparison to other nations, e.g. the United States, but whether or not it is successful in the context of their government. Part I of this paper shall outline the history and creation of administrative law in China. With the creation of administrative law, there was a notion to differentiate Civil Procedure Law with Administrative

Since the early days of man, different societies have had different mechanisms of dealing with individual that go against accepted norms. These norms formed part of the basic education mechanism that a society practised to in the past. Foreign practises were however introduced during the colonial error when the colonial master imposed their own conflict resolution system on the different society. After the assimilation of the foreign system, researchers have now turned their attention to testing whether those systems are compatible with the traditionally practised mechanism within a society. A significant example of such a dilemma is on assessing whether Confucianism is compatible with the rule of law. The two system represent societies that are different and practised by individual that do not share any historical relationship. The growth of an international community has led to the adaptation of the rule of law by most if not all nations in the world. The paper seeks to find out whether Confucianism is compatible with the rule of law and how the two systems can be adopted by a society. In order to assess the possibility of compatibility, it is important to first understand how the two system works individually. The analysis will involve the assessment of the whole functionality of the two policies.

The legal system refers to the rules of the game on how a country’s laws are enacted and enforced. The Chinese legal system is a socialist system of law based primarily on the Civil Law model (Zhang 2016). The civil law was derived from Roman