Judge Of The Modern Society

Judges are the subject of judicature and the central figure of legal world. In modern society, judges have become a specific symbol of the rule of law, safeguarding rights and freedom of citizens, keeping legal order and thus promoting social civilization and progress. Where there are no professional judges in whatever society, there appears imperfection of the rule of law. As a legal professional body in high level specialization, judges have particular inherent nature, conduct model and quality requirements. In the past, academic circles lack a systematic study of internal nature and external requirements to judges as a whole, which is a weak point of the study to the judicial system. China contemporarily is in the course of the historic transformation from traditional legal system to modern legal system, or legal modernization, and lacking a professional judges' body becomes an essential element of affecting legal development. China's judicial civilization and social progress calls upon the birth of a modern professional judges' body, expecting that the judges will uphold the flag of rationality, advance rule-of-law beliefs and actively promote the development of society ruled by law. Based on the ideal pursuit to the judicial civilization and comparative analyses on the judge's systems and experiences from the Western developed rule-of-law, especially Anglo-American, countries, the paper argues that judges' inherent nature in modern times consists of three unity-of-opposites relationships: following but interpreting the law, rational but perceptual, passive but timely active. And judges' conduct characteristics embody judges' autonomy, experience and neutrality, inter alia, judges' autonomy externalizes their independent position in the structure of state power and political system, their identity independence and independence from judges themselves, judges' experience shows on a variety of aspects and links, such as picking evidence, identifying case facts, discovering laws and regulations, determining case nature, and choosing procedures, and judges' neutrality remains a necessary foundation and safeguard to performing judges' duties rightfully. Furthermore, judges' quality composition in modern times includes not only expertise, excellent accomplishment and special approaches of thinking, but professional ethic with legal beliefs and judicial nature, and particular personality characteristics as well. The author proposes that due to the collective gap between contemporary Chinese judges and "judges in modern society" , or "deontic judges" , we should follow the theory of "evolutional rationalism" , "linit construction" approach and the entry of structuring institutions, to reform and improve China' s systems of judge selection, professional welfare, continuing education and management, so as to speed up forming China's professional judges' body and thus to advance China's ongoing process of the rule of law.