The Characteristics Of Nansong Dynasty’s Verdict Of The Collection Of Virtuous And Brightness Verdicts By Famous Judges Of Ancient China For Example

Verdict is an important instrument of justice. Ancient China attached theimportance to making verdict, which is further developed in the Southern SongDynasty. Given the well-developed commodity economy and frequent civiltransactions of the Southern Song Dynasty, the amount of disputes were increasedrapidly, which grow the amount of cases accepted by officials.For the purpose of better resolving conflicts and achieving social harmony, therulers wanted the judges to deal with cases and make legal instruments impartially.Civil officials served as local officials in the Southern Song Dynasty to weakenlocal’s power. The officials were selected through the imperial examinations, so theywere provided with high literary accomplishment and well versed in the legalsystem, which brought the verdicts they made to a pretty high level. So a number offamous verdict collections were made in the Southern Song Dynasty. Among them,The Collection of Virtuous and Brightness Verdicts by Famous Judges of AncientChina was the most representative one. From the view of today, it is relativelycomplete as an existing verdict collection of the Southern Song Dynasty. The authorof this thesis use that as an example to investigate the structure, the expressing styleand the way of reasoning of verdicts of the Southern Song Dynasty.Cases in The Collection of Virtuous and Brightness Verdicts by Famous Judgesof Ancient China are found normally consisted of the following parts: quotations,facts, proofs, reasons, verdict results, approaches and duration. When stating the facts,descriptions can be just narrative or narrative and argumentative at the same time. Inthe Southern Song Dynasty, evidences were valued. Judges used evidence to provefacts whether happened. Different kinds of evidence are as followed: documentaryevidence, witness testimony, confessions, record of inquest, etc. Reasoning is themain part in verdicts. Judges attached the importance to deciding caseslaw-accordingly. But when dealing with cases which involved inheritance, ethics,clans affairs and family relations, judges tended to use sense and reason to make theresults convincing. Depending on different situations, judges would handle cases differently. In order to achieve better results, some parties might not be punishedwhen found guilty, ending up with a mediation could be good to both parties..Approaches and duration did not appear in all the cases.Verdicts of the Southern Song Dynasty got further developed on the basis of theprevious dynasty. The language style mixed prose and parallel prose, with allusionsappropriately added. Strict format and fancy words were not required, so thestatements were mostly precise and solemn.Marvelous reasoning made by the judges of the Southern Song Dynasty reflectsthe superb judging skill of them and the perfection of law system. From TheCollection of Virtuous and Brightness Verdicts by Famous Judges of Ancient Chinawe can see that the judges would reason things out by quoting legal regulations, wecan see it from the cases which involved property relations, personal relationships orboth, verdicts were made directly according to the regulations. However, there were afew facts which were more often used than regulations that could help the judgeswhen deciding a case, such as family bond, ethics and morality, agnation, public orderand good customs, etc. Influenced by the feudal ideology, judges tended to reason acase by reason on the purpose of being in line with the confucianism and feudaldoctrine.Researches on verdicts of the Southern Song Dynasty and The Collection ofVirtuous and Brightness Verdicts by Famous Judges of Ancient China made by legalhistory academia were more focused on specific systems, such as the institution ofmarriage and inheritance, the difference between married women and not marriedwomen’s family positions the legal thought bore by those systems, etc. Yet lessresearchers choose to see them from the perspective of legal documents.Therefore, the author of this thesis proposes to summarize the common characterof judgments of the Southern Song Dynasty by studying the expression style and thesimilarities of the way of reasoning of The Collection of Virtuous and BrightnessVerdicts by Famous Judges of Ancient China by using the method of literaturischerezension and casus analysing, thus to have a better comprehension of the SouthernSong Dynasty’s legal system.