Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present

Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present PDF Author: Philip C. C. Huang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742567710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory, traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law, and past Chinese law—traditional or Maoist—can have no role under the leadership's current preoccupations with modernization and marketization. But what has actually happened historically at the level of judicial practice and the daily lives of common people? In exploring this central question, Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice. Albeit much altered, its legacy can be traced in informal and semiformal community justice (e.g., societal and cadres mediation), as well as in multiple spheres of court-administered formal civil justice, including property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debt obligations. He also identifies the influence of Maoist justice, especially its divorce and civil court mediation practices. Finally, despite the reform era's massive importation of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown remarkable continuity, with major implications for China's future legal system.

Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present

Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present PDF Author: Philip C. C. Huang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0742567710
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Get Book Here

Book Description
The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. Huang shows how, at the level of ideology and theory, traditional Chinese law has been rejected time and again in the past century by China's own lawmakers, first in the late Qing and the republic, then in the revolutionary and Maoist periods of the People's Republic, and finally again in the current reform era. Considering legal theory alone, modern Chinese law can only be Western law, and past Chinese law—traditional or Maoist—can have no role under the leadership's current preoccupations with modernization and marketization. But what has actually happened historically at the level of judicial practice and the daily lives of common people? In exploring this central question, Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice. Albeit much altered, its legacy can be traced in informal and semiformal community justice (e.g., societal and cadres mediation), as well as in multiple spheres of court-administered formal civil justice, including property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debt obligations. He also identifies the influence of Maoist justice, especially its divorce and civil court mediation practices. Finally, despite the reform era's massive importation of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown remarkable continuity, with major implications for China's future legal system.

Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present

Chinese Civil Justice, Past and Present PDF Author: Philip C. Huang
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742567696
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The culmination of twenty years of research, this essential book completes distinguished historian Philip C. C. Huang's pathbreaking trilogy on Chinese law and society from late imperial times to the present. The author argues that, despite formal adherence to Western law and legal theory, traditional Chinese judicial practices continue to flourish. Huang draws on a rich array of court records and field interviews to illustrate the surprising strength of traditional Chinese civil justice, as can be seen in societal and cadres mediation, and in court actions with respect to property rights, inheritance and old-age maintenance, and debts. Maoist justice too remains influential, especially its divorce and court mediation practices. Finally, despite the recent massive adoption of Western laws, legal reasoning employed in judicial practice has shown stunning continuity, with major implications for China's future.

Heaven Has Eyes

Heaven Has Eyes PDF Author: Xiaoqun Xu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190060069
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Heaven Has Eyes is a comprehensive but concise history of Chinese law and justice from the imperial era to the post-Mao era. Never before has a single book treated the traditional Chinese law and judicial practices and their modern counterparts as a coherent history, addressing both criminal and civil justice. This book fills this void. Xiaoqun Xu addresses the evolution and function of law codes and judicial practices throughout China's long history, and examines the transition from traditional laws and practices to modern ones in the twentieth century. To the Chinese of the imperial era, justice was an alignment of heavenly reason (tianli), state law (guofa), and human relations (renqing). Such a conception did not change until the turn of the twentieth century, when Western-derived notions-natural rights, legal equality, the rule of law, judicial independence, and due process--came to replace the Confucian moral code of right and wrong. The legal-judicial reform agendas that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century (and are still ongoing today) stemmed from this change in Chinese moral and legal thinking, but to materialize the said principles in everyday practices is a very different order of things, and the past century was fraught with legal dramas and tragedies. Heaven Has Eyes lays out how and why that is the case.

Mediation in Contemporary Chinese Civil Justice

Mediation in Contemporary Chinese Civil Justice PDF Author: Peter C.H. Chan
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
ISBN: 9004342397
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
In Mediation in Contemporary Chinese Civil Justice, Peter Chan offers one of the most comprehensive analyses of the system of mediation of civil and commercial disputes in contemporary China. Based on extensive interviews with judges and a survey on in-court mediation covering 24 courts in China, the author seeks to answer a question that interests many legal scholars: Is it practically feasible for the mediation of civil disputes in China to take the shape of genuine alternative dispute resolution, rather than being used by the courts as a means to preserve social stability? The book looks beyond procedural rules and examines how judicial culture and beliefs shape the landscape of civil dispute resolution in China.

Civil Justice in China

Civil Justice in China PDF Author: Philip C. Huang
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804727402
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Based on newly available records of 628 civil dispute cases from the 1760's to the 1900's, this book challenges many conventional assumptions about the Qing legal system.

Chinese Justice

Chinese Justice PDF Author: Margaret Y. K. Woo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139499297
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 433

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Book Description
This volume analyzes whether China's thirty years of legal reform have taken root in Chinese society by examining how ordinary citizens are using the legal system in contemporary China. It is an interdisciplinary look at law in action and at legal institutions from the bottom up, that is, beginning with those at the ground level that are using and working in the legal system. It explores the emergent Chinese conception of justice - one that seeks to balance Chinese tradition, socialist legacies and the needs of the global market. Given the political dimension of dispute resolution in creating, settling and changing social norms, this volume contributes to a greater understanding of political and social change in China today and of the process of legal reform generally.

The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China

The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China PDF Author: Philip C.C. Huang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004276440
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
The History and Theory of Legal Practice in China: Toward a Historical-Social Jurisprudence goes beyond the either/or dichotomy of Chinese vs. Western law, tradition vs. modernity, and the substantive-practical vs. the formal. It does so by proceeding not from abstract legal texts but from the realities of legal practice. Whatever the declared intent of a law, it must in actual application adapt to social realities. It is the two dimensions of representation and practice, and law and society, that together make up the entirety of a legal system. The assembled articles by the editors and a new generation of Chinese scholars illustrate a new “historical-social jurisprudence,” and explore the possible conceptual underpinnings of a modern Chinese legal system that would both accommodate and integrate the unavoidable paradoxes of contemporary China.

A History of Civil Law in Early China: Cases, Statutes, Concepts and Beyond

A History of Civil Law in Early China: Cases, Statutes, Concepts and Beyond PDF Author: Zhaoyang Zhang
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004513906
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Through the careful examination of cases, statutes and terminology preserved in both excavated and transmitted materials, this book argues that a civil law with distinctive Chinese characteristics emerged during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 B.C.-A.D. 220).

Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China

Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China PDF Author: Philip C. Huang
Publisher: Law, Society, and Culture in China
ISBN: 9780804741101
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
What changes occurred and what remained the same in Chinese civil justice from the Qing to the Republic? Drawing on archival records of actual cases, this study provides a new understanding of late imperial and Republican Chinese law. It also casts a new light on Chinese law by emphasizing rural areas and by comparing the old and the new.

Civil Litigation in China and Europe

Civil Litigation in China and Europe PDF Author: C.H. (Remco) van Rhee
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400776667
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
This volume addresses the role of the judge and the parties in civil litigation in mainland China, Hong Kong and various European jurisdictions. It provides an overview and an analysis of how these respective roles have been changed in order to cope with growing caseloads and quality demands. It also shows the different approaches chosen in the jurisdictions covered. Mainland China is introducing far-reaching reforms in its system of civil litigation. From an inquisitorial procedure, in which the parties play a relatively minor role, the country is changing to a more adversarial system with increased powers for the parties. At the same time, case management and the role of the judge as it is understood in mainland China remains different from case management and the role of the judge in Western countries, mainly as regards the limited powers of individual Chinese judges in this respect. Changes in China are justified by the ever-increasing case load of the Chinese courts and the consequent inability to deal with cases in an adequate manner, even though generally speaking Chinese courts still adjudicate civil cases within a relatively short time frame (this may, however, be problematic when viewed from the perspective of the quality of adjudication). Growing caseloads and quality concerns may also be observed in various European states and Hong Kong. In these jurisdictions the civil procedural systems have a relatively adversarial character and it is some of the adversarial features of the existing systems of procedure which are felt to be problematic. Therefore, the lawmakers have opted for increasing the powers of the judge, often making the judge and the parties mutually responsible for the proper conduct of civil cases. Starting from opposite directions, mainland China and the various European states and Hong Kong could meet half way in their reform attempts. This is, however, only possible if a proper understanding is fostered of the developments in these different parts of the World. Even though in both China and Europe the academic community and lawmakers are showing a keen interest in the relevant developments abroad, a study addressing the role of the judge and the parties in civil litigation in both China and Europe is still missing. This book aims to fill this gap in the existing literature.