Evaluation Of Interest In The Civil Law

Evaluation of interest plays a significant role in the civil jurisdiction and is an important part of the method of the civil law. This article provides an historical perspective of the development of the theory of evaluation of interest and clears the conception of civil interest and mentions the circumstances in which evaluation of interest should have effect on the conflicts of legal norms. The foundation of the values of modern civil law brings out a sharp divergence of the standard of evaluation of interest, including value-pluralism and value-monism. It is the value-monism that we should adhere to. As for the methods of analysis, this article applies the analysis of norms and analysis of values. The structure of the article is as follows. The introduction mainly introduces the relation between search process of civil law science and method of the civil law, the thesis of the article and the way of argumentation. The article holds the idea that when dealing with the conflicts of legal norms resulting from the conflicts of interests, the judges should judge according to the standard erecting by the internal system of civil law on the basis of value-monism. In part I, this article examines the relationship among the historical jurisprudence, the conceptualistic jurisprudence, the jurisprudence of ends and the jurisprudence of interests, introduces the spread of the theory of evaluation of interest in China. F. C von Savigny's thoughts of ontology of the law determine his thought of epistemology of the law. While the conceptualistic jurisprudence deepens Savigny's thoughts of epistemology of the law, it makes the law science more scientific. But the conceptualistic jurisprudence puts too much emphasis on the pursuit of the formal rationality of the law, which leads it to denying the value factors of the law. The jurisprudence of ends raised by Rudolf von Jhering, as a modified theory, points out that the ends of the law are to protect the living conditions of the society, or to protect the diverse interests. The jurisprudence of interests maintained by Heck regards interests as the center, reveals the relationship between law and interests and lay out the methods to deal with the gap of the law according to the standard of evaluation of interest. In part II, this article argues that interests are the things that can satisfy people's needs, whether natural things or things acquired through people's practices. The interests are classified in this part. Since the changes of the social life and the defects of the cognition of the legislators, it is quite often that the anomie appears concerning the conflict of concrete interests in civil life. In part III, this article analyses the conflict of legal rules and the conflict of legal principals. In fact, the above two conflicts are the conflicts of legal principals, which is determined by the functions of proving and erecting of the principals. The conflicts of the regulations of law are the outward appearance of the conflicts of interests. It is the conflicts of interests that give the importance to the evaluation of interest. In order to make the importance clear, this article follows the approach of formalization that takes the form of conflicts of regulations during the process of judging. The real difficulty is the value judgments when applying the principals of law. The part IV demonstrates the origin of nihilism and absolutism and discusses the foundation of the values in the modern civil law. Object to the value-pluralism, this article holds that the value of justice is the supreme value of civil law.