Identity. "tang Dynasty" Guilty

As the golden times for legal development and prosperity in the history of the ancient China, the Tang Dynasty established the Code of Tang, which had defined the boundaries of status crime clearly and maturely. With the succession of the forefathers' legal achievements on status crime, the Code of Tang took the relationships among rights, obligations and responsibilities put forward by the status into full consideration, and established the guidelines for how to punish the offender concerning status crime in the criminal legislation. In this paper, the author studies the prototypes and characteristics of status crime by putting together the concrete terms concerning status crime in the Code of Tang and then systematically evaluating them.This paper is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author analyses the relative laws concerning status crime in the Code of Tang and divides them into several types. According to the types, we find that the status crime in the Code of Tang nor only succeeded and absorbed the former dynasties' legal achievement, but also innovated, having promoted the relating legislation on status crime. In the second part, by specifying each of the type mentioned above and making references to the theories of legislation in Tang Dynasty, the author concludes four outstanding characteristics in status crime in the Code of Tang: emphasis on the officials' power of arbitrament; ethic oriented; superposition of multiple statuses and expansion of the offenders' status. In the last part, the author draws the conclusion that the laws on status crime in the Code of Tang were not, as people viewed in the past, unfair, privileged and twisted by the dignities, from which we can still learn something suitable for our time and make use of its reasonable part. At the same time, the laws on status crime in the Code of Tang were based on the traditional legal culture, which still have realistic meaning for us in the relative issues concerning status crime in nowadays.