On Legal Standard

Legal standard is a result of human’s inadequate of predictive ability. Formalism in law has gone through the initial stage, in today’s era of rapid social development, legal standards as a distinct legal element has been active in various countries statute books. Being between legal rules and legal principles, legal standard on the one hand has the same logical structure as legal rule; on the other hand it has the ambiguity and openness characteristics as legal principle. Such a unique existence brings a long-term significance to our social and law’s development. By leaving more space to judges, changes in society thus can be introduced into our law system, as like injecting fresh blood to the law’life. But on the other side of coin, legal standard weaken the law’s guidance for people’s behavior, provided convenience to the abuse of discretion. With the increasing complexity of the modern society, with the transformation from "autonomous law" to "responsive law", legal standards will be more widely used, more and more regulations will appear in the face of legal standards in our legal texts.Foreign scholars have already researched legal standards for long, but few domestic scholars have. Faced with such a common but strange existence, we need to understand its characteristics, analyze its pros and cons, in order to ultimately achieve the purpose of serving our social life. According to this idea, the task of the first chapter of this paper is to introduce the concept and features of legal standards, clarify the differences and connections with related concepts. The main idea of the second chapter is to analyze the significance of legal standards, include positive and negative effects might be. On this basis, to give full play to the advantages and prevent the potential negative impact of legal standards, the third chapter focuses on some general theories in practical application, including legislative options and factors to be considered in judicial process issues. For our status quo, the fourth chapter attempts to conduct a general inspection of legal standards in our legislative and judicial actual situation, and provide some ideas to improve our using of legal standard.