The Cultural Factor In Legal Change

As a major characteristic of modern society, legal and the research of relevant theories has important value in theoretical and practical aspects. Realizing the aim of legal is a longtime and complex process. The direct expression of the process is just legal change. The thesis recognized several points:Firstly we can define the legal change by the model as the same as social change as a process of change which includes two aspects. The one is phenomenal level such as the change of legal definition, rule, institution and framework. The other one is substaintial level such as the change of legal value, spirit. Secondly studying from the comparison of Chinese and western legal system, we can find there are lots of factors which can affect the process of legal change in one society. These factors mainly include economic factor, political factor and cultural factor, while the difference of culture is the ultimate reason which leads to the difference between Chinese laws and western laws. Even though the economic and political factors have important effects, they always reflected by the value and spirit of culture. Lastly the thesis analyzes the core role of value-conflicts in legal change from the cultural difference of legal transplant and legal inherit on the basis of discussion for the case of Chinese legal change. And then propose that the integration on culture has important effect to legal change. Although different cultures have different contents and form of action, their effects for legal change are objectively existed and cannot be ignored. Comparison with western countries, cultural factor has more prominent effect to Chinese legal change. The main reason for the phenomena is that there is a dual effect from Chinese and western culture existed in Chinese legal change. Interactive influence of legal culture of China and the west promotes Chinese traditional law to modern law gradually. So the main characteristic in Chinese legal change is integration-fusion. The aim of this thesis is giving a pectination in theory and guidance in practice for the improvement of Chinese legal system by surveying the effect of cultural factor to legal change in one society.