Civil Servant Legal Reader

Author: Chief Editor: Ying Songnian
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2002-01-01
Features: Excerpt:
Norm refers to the standards and principles that govern how people should behave, either formed through custom or established through explicit provisions. The fundamental characteristics of norms are: first, stability, which provides people with a sense of guidance; and second, repeatability, meaning they are not targeted at specific individuals or specific matters but rather at general people and general matters. In social life, behavioral norms are diverse, but they mainly fall into two categories: one is knowledge-based, intelligent, and technical norms. Although they involve personal and social interests, they primarily pertain to the procedures, steps, methods, and techniques people follow in dealing with relationships between humans and nature, humans and society, and humans and the various language symbols they create. These norms do not directly involve conflicts of interest between people and are generally value-neutral and free from moral evaluation. The other category is social norms, which primarily consist of behavioral principles people follow in dealing with relationships with others, society, and the state. These norms involve conflicts of interest between people, as well as their emotions, conscience, and moral evaluation, making them value-neutral.
After defining technical norms and social norms as above, it can be concluded that law is essentially a social norm, involving conflicts of interest and moral evaluation between people. This is because the primary factors leading to social conflicts, disputes, and affecting social stability and harmony are conflicts of interest between people. While technical norms, such as logical rules of thinking, syntactic rules of language, scientific research methods, and operational procedures for craftsmanship, may also give rise to disagreements, these norms are value-neutral and benefit the entire society. Disagreements among proponents are merely differences in understanding, without conflicts of interest, and generally do not lead to social conflicts or disrupt peace.
Of course, this does not mean that all technical norms are entirely unrelated to legal norms. Those technical norms that serve social norms, or those with indirect social properties, become legal norms due to their inseparable connection with social norms. For example: traffic safety rules, production safety regulations, national measurement standards, and symbol rules in digital communication, although they do not involve moral evaluation, directly or indirectly affect conflicts of interest between people, thus possessing varying degrees of legal normative properties.
In national legal documents, especially procedural laws, many technical norms are included to ensure the effective and correct implementation of social norms. For instance, the definition of legal concepts, the dates of legal effectiveness, jurisdiction, trial procedures, and the principles and methods of evidence collection all acquire legal normative properties because they serve corresponding social legal norms.
(II) Laws stipulate the rights and obligations of people
As a social norm, law, due to its involvement in conflicts of interest between people, is fundamentally based on the allocation of relationships between rights and obligations (or powers and responsibilities).
The essence of rights refers to the free range of behavior in social life, meaning the extent, scope, and range within which people autonomously decide whether to engage in certain activities and how to do so. Rights also imply benefits, meaning the ability to realize one's interests without interference from others, or the demand that others meet one's interests. Therefore, rights are often referred to as legitimate interests.
Regarding obligations, the common understanding is that they are commands requiring people to engage in certain activities in specific ways and prohibitions against engaging in activities in certain ways, often summarized as "letting orders be carried out and prohibitions be respected." It can be seen that obligations, as a form of restriction on freedom, imply the inability to achieve certain interests or the need to make sacrifices for others. Thus, the essence of rights and obligations is the relationship between interests among people. Law regulates the relationship between interests among people by stipulating their rights and obligations in behavior.