The Setting Up Of Chinese Legal Authority

"Ruling the country in accordance with the law and building a socialist country of law" was added to China's Constitution as the fundamental strategy of governance and this amendment demonstrates the new era of China's efforts to implement the principle of "rule of law" and establishing the authority of law. The principle of supremacy in law is the guiding principle and basically characteristic of a society of law and establishing the authority of law must be the target of juridification in China.Four parts are discussed in the paper:Part one elaborates the meaning of authority of law and the necessity of achieving that. The term "authority of law" means that law is superior to power and other methods of regulation. Enforcing law through coercion only constitutes the extrinsic guarantee while the intrinsic foundation should be people's identity and trust in law. Establishing authority of law is the pre-requisite of development of human society and transition of authority and the rule of law equals to the supreme authority of law.Part two expounds the basic conditions on which authority of law is constructed and the discussion is mainly based on the references of western societies of law. In the theoretical analysis theories of law of nature, social contract and human nature are specially stressed in their roles of shaping the authority of law. And further implications of such theories to China's case are also laid out. The market economy underlies the authority of law and it not only fuels the material base for the law enforcement but also transforms the legal culture. Constitutional democracy lays the political foundation of authority of law. And the democracy is a political system of people's sovereignty. The supremacy of law over power is realized under the constitutional system.Part three briefly analyses the reasons why supreme authority has been absent in China's legal system. And further efforts are made to propose sets of approaches and policies to establish the authority of law in China from the angle of shaping legal culture and optimizing power supervision. In shaping new legal culture three phases of efforts are listed in the paper. And the supremacy in law is the key to establishing the authority of law. In doing that three dimensions of work are discussed: Number one is to optimize the constitutional supervision through constitutional judicial review; Number two is that the emphasis of supervision should be placed on the executive power because the executive branch is more likely to violate people's interests; Number three is to solve the problem of weak judicial independence in order to facilitate the legal justice through packages of reforms of court system.Part four puts forward several twains of relations which need special attention and handling. The relation between the Party's leadership and the Party's abidance to law needs carefully dealt with. On the relation between rule of law and rule of virtue the awareness of their mutual complementarity on the one hand and the more final role of the law on the other should be encouraged. As for the issue of tradition, there should also be a balance between the inevitability of reforming the tradition and the awareness of steady and gradual transformation of tradition.