Research On Chinese Court Culture

Court culture is one part of culture, just like legal culture. The topic of court culture is studied along with judicial reform in China today. There are three main methods in the dissertation. First of all, it is methodology of social science, which just like Max Webber had said that social science is to try to understand social action and to give the function and process of such action a causal interpretation. Secondly, culture will be used as a method to expound court and judge, because culture is just one kind of history so we can explain law with culture. The third one is comparison. It includes comparing Chinese traditional court culture with modern court culture, as well as comparing Chinese court culture with western countries'court culture.The main topic of this dissertation is that now in China courts in different levels are crucial state organs to resolve social disputes. Therefore, judging, as the core function of court should play important role. But traditional court culture has different understanding of judging. To establish current court culture is to take knowledge of two sides of traditional court culture, and focus on the character of judicial democracy. Besides this, there are another two characteristics of modern court culture, one is professional tendency and the other is unity. It is thought that there are two parts of current court culture in the dissertation. One is traditional court culture, another is court culture which was formed after Chinese Culture Revolution. The latter has carried forward the former. The inventive work of the paper is to find that traditional court culture has its inherent character, such feature determines the integration of court culture.The dissertation is divided into six chapters.The first chapter is about basic theories of court culture, including what is culture, what is legal culture, and the arguments on similar topics. Then the paper puts forward the definition of court culture which consists of judge's view to law and court, and their action models inside and outside court, as well as rules, institutions, equipments, etc. relating to court.The second chapter mainly analyses and compares different court culture of United States, England, Germany and France. In the conclusion, the author sums up four similar characteristics of these four countries'court culture: firstly, the legal profession has belief on law; secondly, local courts pay much attention on judicial democracy; thirdly, the appointments and removals of judge have relationship with judicial independence; fourthly, judges have some power of legislation.The third chapter moves to Chinese traditional court culture which is formed from Oin Dynasty to the foundation of new China and Culture Revolution. From the end of Qing Dynasty to Republic of China, court culture had has a chance to change but it was ceased because new China abandoned all legal rules and institutions of Cuo mindang Government. So the traditional court culture still captures the new court.The fourth chapter mainly demonstrates the integration of traditional court culture. Such tradition influenced modern court culture, especially judicial reform. That means traditional court culture has positive and negative effects on judicial reform.The fifth chapter analyses different functions of Supreme Court including judging, political function, administrative function, judicial interpretation function, and argues that the Supreme Court play a leader role in court system of all China. Local courts have no power to have their own court culture by now.The sixth chapter summarizes and compares court culture from a global perspevtive and tries to find the future of Chinese modern court culture.