The Legal Logic And Argument In The Song Dynasty

QingMing Cases is precious historical material for the study of Song Dynasty, especially the law, economy and social life in the Southern Song Dynasty. By analyzing the cases collected in the book, we can not only understand the jurisdiction of the Northern and Southern Song Dynasty, but also benefit us on the restoration of the process of legal argumentation at that time, especially the Southern Song Dynasty, leaving us a new cognition of ancient Chinese law customs.From this book is found the judicial officials’ excellent techniques in law interpretation and argumentation, as well as their rigorous logic of trials. Objectively, these are the requirements of the complicated lawsuit cases due to the economic and social developments of the Song Dynasty. Meanwhile, the officials’competence is also associated with the trend of professionalization of legal officials. The improvements on scholar-bureaucrats’legal accomplishment as a result of various national legal tests also had direct contributions.Collating the applications of "reason law" in the book, we found that:(a) criminal cases were mainly judged according to the statutes, while (b) the gist for civil cases can be not only statute laws, but also classic works of Confucian school, precedents, village regulations and agreements, etc. As for the way of application, the statute and other rules can be applied simply and directly, or be interpreted before application. For the statutes, officials were favor of sticking to the Originalism interpretation i.e. supporting their interpretation of law with lawmakers’ purposes when quoting the law. In this standpoint, judges were apt to refer to the principle of system explanation to interpret the law.Mohist logic is used as a tool in the logical analysis of legal practice in Song Dynasty. Mohist logic is the summary of ancient Chinese logic models, with which the analysis of legal practice in Song Dynasty is reasonable. Mohist Canon names the process of inference and argumentation as lici(present the parlance), which insists that inference should be made on the premise of defining connotations of ming, the concept, distinguishing the property of causality between causes and results, i.e. different kinds of gu, obeying certain li, the logical laws and demonstrating in accordance with xiao, different forms of practice. From the cases in the collect, it can be implied that judicial officials in Song Dynasty attach great importance to the explanations of legal concepts, arguing with respect to different proposition and adhere to the law of identity, law of excluded middle and law of contradiction. The process of argumentation also complies with the forms of The Reasoning of in Mohist Canon, for example, jia (hypotheses), pi (analogies), yuan (citations), and tui(corollaries), etc. In conclusion, therefore, the legal practice in Song Dynasty revealed considerable logicality.We analyze the process of argumentation of the legal practices in Song Dynasty through specific cases with the help of modern legal argumentative theories. Analyzing different cases, we found that those cases did have followed some rules during the trials although the judicial acts in Song Dynasty did not argue wielding the corresponding patterns of demonstration. Obviously, the argumentation conforms to the syllogism. In some complicated cases, Toulmin’s model of argument and five-paragraph theme could also illustrate the process of argumentation of judicial practice in Song Dynasty. Certainly, this argumentation is exerted consciously, instead of spontaneously, without fixed patterns.Conclusions are drawn from the above analyses that (a) law practitioners’ legal accomplishment are highly-qualified (b) the legal traditions in Song Dynasty showed remarkable logicality and (c) the argumentations of legal practice in Song Dynasty are rational. Consequently, the ambiguous view that ancient Chinese legal conventions are Kadi-Justiz is unscientific and contradicts with historical facts.