The Study Of The System Of Law In Chu State

The System of Law in Chu State is the representative of the Legal Cultural of kingdoms in south during Spring and Autumn and the Warring States Period. According to relevant documents’records, Chu pursues strict and impartial legal system all the time from national founding to national annihilating, which is the most important ingredient of legal culture in the Pre-Qin Period. The law of Chu is flourishing in many aspects such as written and canonical laws and judgments, perfect judicial organ, strict and normative justice, widely applicable law and so on. However, many related documents of Chu’s laws have destroyed when the princes vied for supremacy and Qin burned the books after that. The later only can know little about the severe enforcement of the laws according to the few records of the Chu’s laws in extant documents.Bao Shan Chu Chien which was unearthed in Two warring States Chu Tomb Bao Shan Jingmen City Hubei province in1987provides some new, rich and valuable materials to study Chu’s laws. On the other hand, Bao Shan Chu Chien is also main material to study Chu’s laws from the literature nowadays. This article takes the law of Chu as the object of study and comprehensively comb and analysis it. The main content includes several aspects as follows:I. Based on the overall grasp of the previous research on the legal system of Chu, the latter makes some comprehensive analysis on the library of Chu legal system from4aspects:the research on Chu legal content, the research on the formation and development of legal system, the research on Chu judicial system and the research on the legal thought and legal characteristics. Meanwhile, it pointes out some deficiencies in the research of legal system at present and some related problems to be solved. This article aims at doing some research and investigation about some previous problems based on the forward research.II. The latter sorts out the basic thread of the development of Chu State Law by analyzing ancient literature and unearthed documents. This article draws support from a large number of materials such as Zuozhuan, Strategies of the Warring States. Strategies of Chu State,"Mandarin’Chu dialect","Lv’s spring and Autumn""Qiguokao", Bao Shan Chu Chien and so on and analyses the legal status of Chu state in each period in the historical development of narrative sequence to make a comprehensive description and analysis on the whole the legal development, which draws a conclusion that the legal development has experienced from the common law to the statute in the continuous development and improvement process.III.The Chu law is not only the main content of this article but also the most basic research. This paper focuses on the existing historical data and draws a conclusion about Chu legal system from three aspects:the criminal law, civil law, military law. Firstly, to the criminal law, this article does a simple sort about penalty names in the state of Chu and adds some uncompilatory contents relied on "Chu criminal law" in Qiguokao written by Dongshuo in Ming Dynasty. At the same time, this article unscrambles accusation in Chu State from modern perspective according to "Bao Shan Chu Chien" Secondly, to the civil law, it displays in membership, adjustment of ownership relations, marriage and inheritance etc from the modern civil sense to observe the specific performance of civil legal relationship and the handed down for generations and unearthed literature as research foundation. In addition, It must be noted that there is no true commercial law in ancient China. So in this paper, the economic management (including business management) integrally is incorporated into the civil law and describes briefly. Finally, to military law, the later is just aware of the strict discipline of Chu, we only can find two plaintext military records:Destorying the army and killing the general and Will escape when the kill from the literature. These specific punishment can be found in the content of criminal law.IV. The judicial system of Chu State is the main content in this paper. This article considers Bao Shan Chu Chien as main material for study. Based on textual criticisms and explanations of Legal terminology in Bao Shan Chu Chien by academic world at present, this article will analyses and investigate about judicial system of Chu State from two sides:One is the judicial organ. Although the judicial organ in Chu has perfect, whether there is a professional judicial organ awaits the research because it is in the early history of civilization. At the moment, we can confirm that Chu’s justice belongs to administration which is like any other kingdom in Central Plains. It means that administrative departments have the judicial power and administrative unit is a judicial organ if it is above the county level. Although no full-time judiciary in Chu, there are some full-time judicial officials such as SiBai, TingLi, ZuoYin and so on. This paper carefully analyzes the three kinds of official’s duties and their functions in the judicial activity and sorts out other local officials who have judicial functions. The other is judicial system. This paper carries on the discussion from the proceedings and litigation principle. In litigation procedure, we can identify that the processes of Chu trying judicial cases includes the prosecution, trial,, execution, case closed, archiving which is very normative and precise by analyzing every type of Jane papers from Bao Shan Chu Chien. Litigation system refers to various principle when judicial trial. We can know that Chu law lays down the law on every link of proceedings of cases such as the judicial jurisdiction, evidence, trial level system, instrument cases each link system and so on so that it formes a set of strict judicial procedure which constitutes a complete and normative judicial system of Chu State with judicial institutions together.V. The Chu legal thoughts manifest the fusion of Daoism, Confucianism, and Legalism. This article mainly does some research on Chu unearthed materials reflected in the legal thinking and partial table of contents in The Guodian Chu slips and Chu Bamboo Slips in Shanghai Museum to analyses the legal thoughts in them because of the necessity of the research of unearth literature. Because of individual ability and the limited length, there are only4Jane papers to analyses briefly from legal thought of Daoism Confucianism. The legal thought of Daoism, which gives priority to The Guodian Chu slips Lao Tzu and the silk manuscript Lao Tzu and the handed down Lao Tzu are the supplements, shows that Taoism claims to lighten law but not to abandon it. The legal thought of Confucianism shows that early Confucian emphasis on etiquette and culture and advocates torely on virtue supplied by punishment. Until it’s latter, the composition "law" is more and more visible. This paper also simply analyzes Wu Qi’s legal thought.VI. The legal characteristic of Chu State is to probe into the law practice in the overall characteristic. This article is based on the study of previous section and connects some related historical materials of Chu to conclude and analyses the legal characteristics of southern states with strong regional characteristics. That can be divided into three parts:firstly, the law is forbidding and the law enforcement is strict, which is obviously different from the legal system in the etiquette society of Central Plains; then, the rule of Chu reflects the harmony and contradiction between the rule of law and rule of man, the rule of ritual, the rule of virtue. Chu State legal system relies on the rule of law, but, to some degree, it is inevitable to wear several effects caused by class society ruler’s absolute rights. So the rulers should combine the rule of ritual and the rule of virtue when using the rule of law and regard them as three indispensable ways; finally, among Chu’s legal system, the influence of "the rule of God" thoughts extremely profound, which is an important local features...