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Stories Of Judge Pao: Another Angle Of View To Reinterpret The Legal Culture Of China

Posted on:2003-09-27Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:Z M XuFull Text:PDF
GTID:1116360065461250Subject:Legal history
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
In the tide of the afflux of knowledge from west to east, with the transplantation of modern legal system, development of legal education and the introduction of the western legal analysis method, both the legal system and the legal knowledge system of classical China ruptured, then collapsed. Armed with the modern western legal terms and method of analysis, the modem narrative style under the cognitive control of the genealogy of western legal knowledge has been established little by little for about 100 years, despite the frequent changes of the economic structure, political system and ideology. But, we can still argue that whether the western legal knowledge explained the special legal system of ancient China effectively. On the other hand, the study of the Chinese legal history, even the so-called the study of the Chinese Legal Culture History has been constrained by the official information such as the legal codes and the official history. Legal codes may partly owe to ideal construct, and even official history cannot avoid being tempering. The official history focused on the politic life and the legal life of the emperors and his ministers, but not those of common people. So, the paper takes the stories of Judge Pao, which was tinted with popular colors when spreading, as a new angle of view to reinterpret the legal culture of China.The paper is consisted of three chapters. Because the paper is involved in the fields of law and literary as well as history, it is necessary to explain the learned stance and the analysis method in Chapter One, The Literature Narration of China Ancient Law. Based on trimming the analysis style of the study of China legal history, the outline of the problematique of this article has been drawn out. It is made clear that it valuable for understanding Chinese legal culture to reconstruct the legal life and legal cognition of common people. The paper holds that literature story not only makes a kind of historic material, but also can be regarded as a kind of narrative style of history. The role literature story play in narrating the legal life of common people cannot be replaced by archives and official history. As for Gong'an stories, some of them originated from judicatory archives. Now that one purpose: of the study of the legal culture is explaining the meaning structure hidden in the law, the explanation should be made in the context, which should be constructed on related history facts such as we find in the literature stories.The main task of Chapter Two, Three Narrations of Judge Pao, is to reveal the relationship between the three Judge Pao's images, an incorruptible official in history, a judiciary and an administrator reflected by his own work and a popular belief in popular story. In history, Judge Pao gets the features of being filial, loyal, incorruptible, kind to common people and direful to nobles. All these features play basic keys in literary narrations afterwards. Reading what he had written, a more factual image of Judge Pao emerges. Being a normal judiciary and an administrator, what Judge Pao thought reflected the demands of the era. There are two basic points of Judge Pao's thoughts. One of them is the harmony between nature, public will and law should be kept. The other is the handling of emperor power and the exercising of panel law should accord with the golden mean. After reviewing the venation of Judge Pao's story at large, comparisons made between the image in popular narration and in historic narration show consistence as well asinconsistence. Inconsistence attributes to many popular stories are not related to Judge Pao and the purpose to apotheosize him. Apotheosizing makes Judge Pao retained the divinity power walking between the lower world and this world to rescue common people. At the same time, Judge Pao became the symbol of authority and justice.There are 271 stories the paper deal with, which take the form of drama, local opera, short story and novel. After statistical analysis, it is clear that most of them are criminal c...
Keywords/Search Tags:story of Judge Pao, popular narration, China legal culture, judicatory, criminal law
PDF Full Text Request
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