Discussing Of The Legal Faith Under The Linguistic Context Between China And Western

Berman’s Law and Religion has gained widespread acceptance in China, and in the eyes of some academics this book points to the way laws can be effectively enforced. Almost all scholars in relevant circles keep in mind the dictum in the book: Law must be believed in, or it will be blank words. So at a time when legal development meets a bottleneck, people seem to have grapsed the soltution. Legal failth theories have won the day, to the point where legal faith is always brought up on the subject of law obedience and enforcement. But all these formulations are only descriptive and cannot be based upon to explain law as a faith, or why rule of law in the West is therein imbedded, or what is the object of faith. Neither can they explain what faith is, what law is, whether law can be believed in as faith or whether the simple analogy across linguistic contexts holds. Obviously, these arguments are not well developed.Taking this into account, this thesis tries to put the conceptual legal faith in western linguistic context in a constrastive way and probes the rationality and feasibility. This thesis goes on the argue that the western faith in law is a belief in natural law, i.e., the essential values reflected by law; while in contemporary China, with inadequate empirical research methodology, an instrumentalist view of law has prevailed and some laws even go against basic values like justice and order. So proposing legal faith is way ahead of our time. The approach we need to take is to proceed from realities on the ground in China and provide more justifiable and more convincing solutions to the urgent problems in the process of consolidating rule of law.