Legal Homework: Seeking and Recalling

Author: Liu Xing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-03-01
Features: The articles included in this book were written over the years and can be traced back to a long time ago. The author has divided them into four parts.
Part One: Reading. Reading means imitation, accumulation, supplementation, and adjustment for the reader. On the other hand, using the familiar hermeneutic discourse of today, it is inevitable for the reader to have ideas or feel eager to act when reading. Moreover, reading is essentially an exchange between the reader and the reading material, making it unlikely to result in the Lockean blank slate of passive acceptance. Therefore, the outcome of reading is to write down reading impressions, provided that paper and pen are ready. The articles included in this part are aimed at both the works of foreign scholars and those of Chinese scholars, as well as both purely academic works and popular exhortations. Of course, for the author, these articles are written out of personal feelings.
Part Two: Writing. Writing is both an expression of reading impressions and a continuation of them. This part mainly focuses on the author's reflections. These reflections are not necessarily targeted at specific textual works, but they are definitely aimed at specific object texts. If the term "text" can be slightly broadened in meaning, it can refer to social phenomena, including legal phenomena.
Part Three: Reflecting on the Past. Clearly, the title "Reflecting on the Past" in writing already expresses that this part is focused on past traditions. In the late 1990s, the author wrote a series of short essays on China's legal tradition in column form for Southern Weekly and Legal Daily.
Part Four: Reminiscing About Myself. This part is somewhat similar to a diary, consisting of prefaces, postscripts, and self-promotional introductions written over a period of time. It may bear some signs of being overly sentimental. Reincorporating it into this book serves two purposes: first, to remember, retrieve, and remind oneself that one still needs to continue legal work, and that one's legal knowledge remains naive; second, to allow readers to more clearly understand the origins of the author's writing at certain moments in time.