A Study On The Problems Of Material Law In The Tang And Song Dynasties

The research target of this project is "property law in Tang and Song Dynasty". The phrase "Property Law" is derived from Roman laws, which is paralleled to "Human Law" and "Procedure Law". This article focuses on several issues concerning property law in Tang and Song Dynasty, as well as a comparison with Roman Laws.In the first place, against the backdrop of vague definition and analysis of the concept of "Property" in the civil law of Tang and Song Dynasty among the law historical circle, this article makes use of the general law texts of Tang and Song Dynasty, plus private contracts with some sort of legal enforcement to examine all kinds of appellation of "Property" along with the differences between related concepts and intension in Tang and Song Dynasty, concepts related to "Property" and the difference in their intension. It clarifies and confirms the scope and intension of movable and immovable property at that time, laying the foundation of Property Law research of Tang and Song Dynasty.Secondly, the article conducts comparative research on prohibited property in Roman Laws and their counterparts in Tang and Song laws, including res divini iuris, res religiosa, res communes, res publicae, res corpus and contraband etc. A lot of similarities can be found in definition and legal stipulations of Tang and Song laws and Roman laws. However, Tang and Song laws and Roman laws do allow people to own different res privatae.In addition, the article discusses the movable and immovable property in Tang and Song Dynasty respectively. In the facet of movable property, the article focuses on initial ways that ownership is obtained, comparing the regulations in the law of Tang and Song Dynasty and Roman Times, including the preoccupation of Bona Vacantia, discovery of property buried underground, the picking up of lost property etc, to discover the social differences reflected behind the laws, and bring up some important inspiration that traditional law can give to modern laws. As to immovable property, attention was focused on land ownership of Tang and Song, and the article examines the opinion of feudal state ownership which had a comparatively large influence, discussing ownership, system of ownership and their differences in a theoretical perspective. At the same time, taking the land equalization system in Tang Dynasty into consideration, this article claims that the Yongye and Mouth points field in essence should be regarded as an integral part, which means they all belong to the private land. On this basis, the article further analyzes the collapse of land equalization system and its relationship with commodity economy, and describes various manifestations of the deepened private land ownership in Song Dynasty, such as the acceleration of land transfer, diversification of means of land transactions, standardization of the procedure of land transactions and etc.Through the above horizontal comparative research of property laws in Tang&Song Dynasty and Roman times, as well as the vertical research of different periods, it is vividly shown that:Firstly, there’re many similarities between property laws in Tang and Song Dynasty and Roman laws. People established many extremely similar legal rules when confirming issues of ownership. This can serve as a solid evidence that people tend to adopt similar solving methods in similar circumstances, mirroring the commonality of human society development. Secondly, many differences can be found between Tang&Song Dynasty and Roman laws. This illustrates that people may adopt different ways to deal with problems in the same situation if they belong to different social and cultural background. In fact, these differences are crystal reflections of underlying differences in religious, political, traditional and economic system in Tang&Song and Roman Society, representing the particularity of the development of human society. Last but not least, during this comparative research of law of land ownership in Tang and Song Dynasty, we can see that people indeed had private ownership of their land. Yet the differences are that before the Mid-Tang, private ownership of the land was limited and intervened by several aspects such as natural economy and political power, but from Mid-Tang to Song Dynasty, due to the rapid development of commodity economy and emancipation of systematic constraints in all facets, private ownership of land goes from the easy to the difficult and complicated level, finally becoming the key factor triggering social, economic and cultural boom in Song Dynasty.