Criminal Law's Interpretation Methodology

Legal hermeneutics has a very long history. In recent years, departments of law pay a lot attention to it, and it becomes more and more prosperous. Philosophy hermeneutics denied the objectivity of interpretation, but we can not deny that the authors decide the inner-circle meanings of the paper. Interpretation methods are just like the bridges between readers and the papers. Criminal law interpretation methods have their own peculiar things, but also follow the common interpretation methods.Because of the different law cultural traditions, the two main law divisions have different interpretation methods. In England, there mainly are the literal rule, the golden rule and the mischief rule. The law hermeneutics of the United States birthed from England, but with the development of time, there came out about twenty methods. Civil law countries have a tradition of valuing the academic interpretation. Although they are written law countries, but judges have great discretion. In our country, scholars have different education backgrounds, and they have different opinions about concepts and connotations on criminal law interpretation methods. According to different importance of every method and the need of the paper's logic, this thesis just discusses literal interpretation method, systematical interpretation and genre thoughts, and seldom covers other methods.Our country's criminal law is written in Chinese language, so literal interpretation method has an absolutely preference than other methods. Because the thorough dividing of methodology, this thesis talks literal interpretation method as a method opposite to logical interpretation method. Literal interpretation method includes direct interpretation and grammatical interpretation. Direct interpretation actually is a method of "not interpret". When legal provisions are clear, we can use it directly and do not need to interpret. Grammatical interpretation contains certain systematical things, but is different from systematical interpretation method. From the perspective of linguistics, the words of criminal law contain common language and normalization language. Common language is directly from common people's life, so it has preference in usage. As a result of conciseness of legal provisions, there are normalization languages, and they have a tendency for material interpretation. Normalization languages' material interpretation means literal interpretation method is not a perfect one.Systematical interpretation method also calls contextual interpretation, and its philosophical basis is structuralism. Structuralism is too abstract, and it breaks the link between language and real life. As a result, "conceptual structure" can not be perfect, so a law provision is dipped in the order of whole law.One of the derived principles of doctrine of a legally prescribed punishment for a special crime is banning analogy, but analogy is not equal to genre thoughts. There are no two same things in the world, but identical one, so human beings use genre concepts to refer to things. Criminal law is regulator of human's actions, so concepts of criminal law is genre concepts, and the thoughts of criminal law are genre thoughts.