A Study Of Xue Yung - Sheng 's Legal Thought

In Chinese legal history, Xue Yunsheng is the last master in Chinese traditional jurisprudence. He was born in the late Qing dynasty, and work in the ministry of punishment for most of his career. He retired at the turn of the century, and passed away before the campaign of amending law. He has rich experience in the law enforcement and judicial practice. At the same time, he was absorbed in traditional jurisprudence and systematically summed up a great deal of ancient legal documents. After carefully study, he wrote down the following works:Collection of Han Law, Comparison of Tang and Ming Law, Questions on Qing Code, Review on Qing Law in the Comparison with Tang and Ming Law, and so on. In a word, Xue Yunsheng epitomized Chinese traditional jurisprudence.Many of Xue’s works were scattered and lost for various reasons, he handed down even a small number of works, which are rare to be accessed. In all his finished works, there is no doubt that Comparison of Tang and Ming Law and Questions on Qing Code is that he devoted the most effort——he once said that he spent most of his life on them——therefore the idea in this two books best represent his legal ideology, and this article would be based on these two books to analyze Xue’s legal ideology.This article is divided in three chapters:In the first chapter, the life of Xue Yunsheng will be introduced, as well as the social background when he lived; The second chapter would be used to analyze Xue’s thoughts on legislation, law enforcement and judicial practice, as well as his academic contribution; The last chapter contain two parts:In the first one, Xue’s influence on the campaign of legal amending would be analyzed, including his impact on the main participators and his thoughts incarnated in the new Codes; In the second part, we would focus on the limitations of Xue’s legal ideology and what caused the limitations.