A Study Of The Comparison Between Chinese And Western Legal Concepts

Maine once said, If by any means we can determine the early forms of jural conceptions, they will be invaluable to us. Because among these ideas, there may contain all the forms that laws could express themselves afterwards. Based on this, this paper compares the basic concepts of law in Chinese and Western legal systems, as well as the nature of law. The author believes that the Chinese and Western legal tradition are metally agreed on a series of important issues. The solutions that the two traditonal legal systems will choose to solve the common problems faced by the nation and society are roughly the same, and the gap between the two legal culture is not as big as we thought before. However the differences are just there, starting from the similarities and differences between them, I choose to compare the Chinese and Western legal concepts, in order to study both the similarities and differences, find out problems and try to solve them.In my opinion, the significance of this article are as following. First of all, the understanding and pursuing of the legal concept reflect human’s pursuit of the certainty and objectivity of the law. Second, it provides the successors with references and accumulations of the development of legal culture to get a more scientific and macro understanding of legal concepts. Third, through the comparison, we can recognize Chinese traditional legal concept characteristics, draw differences, advantages and disadvantages, in order to perfect the law through the concept and nature of law.The introduction part of the article raise some questions-What is law? What is our understanding of law? By studying the legal concept and legal nature, it extends to the two major aspects of legal concepts, the form and the essence. One is the appearance of the law, that is, the rules or conditions which are needed to be laws. The other is the specific contents and the essence under its appearance. Around these two, the author began to pursue the legal concept.This article consists of four parts:The first part is what is law?-the study of the etymology of Chinese and Western law. This part mainly retraces the origin of the form of the law. This chapter is divided into two sections. Section1talks about the origin of the form of law in ancient China, primarily introduces the evolution of the form of ancient Chinese law, which eventually became the law. Section2focuses on the origin of the form of law in ancient western and begins with the natural law in the history of western law to seek the origin of the western law form.The second part is the origin of the nature of law. This part focuses on the origin of the nature of law. This chapter consists of three parts, in the first quarter, the author talks about the essence of ancient Chinese law through a comparison of an abundance of material from the Xia Dynasty to the modern times. The second part is the origin of the nature of western law. The author analyzes many views of the law essence from natural law school, which could help to get a comprehensive study of the law origin in the west. The main content of Section3is the problems that we find by comparing Chinese and western legal essence, such as why there is no development in the essence of Chinese law. This chapter is the main part of the whole article.The third part is about the legal content and also divided into two sections. They are the content of ancient Chinese law and western law respectively. This part is actually the sublimation of the first part.The fourth part is the key point of the article. It compares the Chinese and wetern legal concepts, which is the topic of my article. There are four sections in this charpter. The first one discusses the fuzziness and certainty of the legal concepts. The second section talks about the Chinese law concept which is severe-penalty and the comprehensive legal concept in the west. The third section is about the law is justified and the natural law. The last section discusses the relationship between the justice and the Chinese and western legal concepts.The conclusion echoes the beginning. The article studies the similarities and differences between Chinese and Western legal concepts through the comparison, finds out problems and put forward questions. It tries to figure out the legal essence through the studying of legal concept, in order to solve the problems better and improve the Chinese law.