The Evolution Of The Legal Profession In Late Qing And Early Republic

This thesis aims to clarify the process of the transformation of the legal profession from traditional to modern,to find out the institutional reasons and jurisprudential basis behind this change,and to explore how the traditional litigators gradually became extinct and how lawyers gradually became accepted by the people behind the alternation of the old and the new.In the late Qing and early Republican periods,China witnessed the alternation of the old and the new legal professions,and the fusion of the transplantation of Western legal systems with the cultivation of localised improvements.To this end,this article firstly elaborates on the concepts of litigators and lawyers,and lists a series of issues arising from the alternation between Eastern and Western legal groups in the late Qing and early Ming dynasties,and the new organisations and systems that emerged as a result of the introduction of the system,with the aim of exploring the jurisprudence behind their creation.The late Qing and early Ming dynasties were a period of fundamental change in Chinese society,when the West became increasingly powerful and Chinese civilisation was deeply affected.As a result,the traditional Chinese legal system collapsed and the jurisprudence of Shen Jiaben and Wu Tingfang began to be transplanted to the Western legal system,and the lawyer system was directly introduced.As western and Chinese civilisations came into contact and collided,the strengths of Chinese civilisation began to waver and fade,leading to the transformation of various social groups;as western political and cultural ideas continued to spread in China,the Chinese people began to awaken,which provided an important ideological basis for the emergence of lawyers;the strong desire of the Qing government to recover its extra-territorial jurisdiction was the most direct impetus for the official change of the system;foreign lawyers came to China to practise.This provided a direct and objective reference for the transplantation of the lawyer system.All these reasons formed an important social foundation for the transition from the traditional litigation system to the lawyer system.During the Republican period,the lawyer system began to be implemented,and the number of lawyers in the judiciary grew.Lawyer group with a new image of practice in front of people,legal autonomy organization lawyers guild and related policies also came into being,bringing a lot of "new weather",but inevitably there are some historical legacy still exists.During the Republican period,"the lawyer is emerging,the litigator is dead" has become the general trend,by the traditional litigation services undertaken by the lawyer has gradually replaced the lawyer,the litigator tends to decline.However,due to the social turmoil and frequent regime changes at the time,the Republican judiciary was full of chaos and a mixture of the old and the new,especially the legacy of the "concurrent justice" system,which was most prominent,and the lawyer system was not yet widespread throughout the country,leaving room for the continued existence of litigators.The Republic of China’s judicial system was flawed,allowing a new group of people with non-statutory status and leaving them the opportunity to assist in litigation.The existence of lawyers in the Republic did not mean that litigators immediately disappeared,and the two practices were intertwined for a long time.The litigators struggled to survive on the basis of their inertial practice,although its function and influence,which could not be compared to that of the past,remained resilient.This article examines the above issues,and compares the specific context of the times to clarify the jurisprudence behind the transformation of the legal service community from traditional to modern,and to explore the jurisprudence behind the transformation of the legal service community from traditional to modern through the "new weather" and "old residue".The jurisprudence behind the transformation of the legal service community from traditional to modern times.All substantive institutional construction cannot rely solely on the mechanical transplantation of foreign systems;localisation is an essential part of the process.The main purpose of this article is to identify a series of phenomena and problems that arose during the transition from traditional litigators to modern lawyers in modern China,to clarify the jurisprudential basis behind the system,to reflect on the reasons for the twists and turns in the development of the lawyer system in modern China,and to provide new inspiration and new ideas for the construction of the rule of law in contemporary China.