Civil Priority Research

Civil priority is an instrument aimed at providing special protection for specific civil rights or obliges. This dissertation is devoted to studying payment priority among the civil priorities.Civil priority is an old instrument in civil law, which can be traced in Roman Law and ancient Chinese civil law practice. Although equal legal status and civil rights of civil subject has become the fundamental principle of modern civil law since modern times, civil priority has been stipulated again in French and Japanese civil code with even wider scope of invalidity. In the meantime, some scholars hold that civil priority is an outdated security instrument, which contradicts with the principle of equal protection in modern civil law.This article is divided into nine chapters. The introduction part illustrates the objective and methodology of this dissertation.Chapter One analyses the concept of civil priority. It introduces and comments on different definitions of civil priority and examines the difference between priority and payment priority, and that of priority, security and lien.Chapter Two introduces the stipulation of priority and its adoption in some countries. The author has conducted a minute study of the formation of priority in Roman law, the relationship between priority and other security instrument and the attitudes towards priority in countries of Civil Law system or Common Law system. The author has also studied priority in ancient Chinese law and legal practice. It concludes that although the legislation of priority is scattered and uses different terms in different laws, priority is a quite common phenomenon in many countries' legislation.Chapter Three is centered upon the legislative objective of priority. The analysis has been carried out from the following perspective: the soci-economical background, the conflict between priority and debt equality, legislative purpose and value orientation.Chapter Four highlights the characteristics of priority.Chapter Five examines the invalidity of priority. Priority is characterized by payment precedence. This chapter is focused on the relationship between payment precedence of priority and that of other security property.Chapter Six discusses some other questions concerning invalidity of priority.Chapter Seven is about some restrictions to priority. Priority is a prestige of the specific oblige regulated by law, however, a right unbalance may be caused among obliges, obligator and the third party in the absence of proper restrictions. The author considers restrictions from the aspects of debt limit, invalidity period, means of practice and remedy to the failure of demonstration with a view to realizing the legislative purpose of priority and at the same time ensuring other people's lawful interests.Chapter Eight discusses perishing and realization of priority.Chapter Nine is about tax priority. It is a worldwide common regulation that the State is entitled to tax priority. As one of the priorities, tax priority is discussed from the perspective that tax is a debt in public law. This part is independent of other chapters and is a visualization of fundamental theory of priority in tax.The dissertation is concluded with some suggestions to priority legislation in China. The author believes that priority with Chinese characteristic should be incorporated in Property Law or Civil Code in China specifying priority's definition, characteristic, the feature of debt secured by priority and precedence in case of conflict between priority and other properties.