World of Legal Officials - A Historical Perspective on the Professionalization of Chinese Legal Professionals

Author: Ren Xirong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: This study involves the living environment, group structure, knowledge structure, power structure, and ethical orientation of judicial officials in specific historical and spatial contexts. It also explores the continuity of ancient judicial culture in modern times in terms of development, transformation, and continuation. The entire work is divided into seven chapters.
Chapter 1 discusses the legitimacy of the term "judicial official" and, with the help of Shen Shi's A Study of Judicial Officials Throughout History, explains why the term "judicial official" is used as a general designation for the ancient judicial group.
Chapter 2 examines the basic legal cultural background of judicial officials' survival by analyzing the ethical nature of ancient Chinese law, thereby illustrating the institutional and spiritual context that serves as the premise for their existence.
Chapter 3 studies the group structure of judicial officials, detailing which individuals belonged to the ancient judicial group and analyzing the characteristics of their composition.
Chapter 4 analyzes the knowledge structure of judicial officials, thoroughly examining their general and specialized knowledge. Through a historical examination of systems such as the imperial examinations, personnel selection, and performance evaluations, it explains the internal mechanisms that prevent the knowledge of judicial officials from becoming specialized.
Chapter 5 analyzes the power structure of judicial officials. Since the modern legal profession community includes judges and prosecutors who exercise judicial and procuratorial power, as well as lawyers representing litigants and legal scholars engaged in speculative research on law, the definition of the nature of the legal profession community does not consider power aspects. However, in ancient China, the judicial group consisted solely of state officials. Therefore, in a certain sense, ancient Chinese judicial officials could also be referred to as a "community of power." However, the content, structure, division of labor, and internal operational mechanisms of this power have their own unique logic.
Chapter 6 analyzes the ethical orientation of judicial officials. Traditionally, in the study of the legal profession group, especially the legal profession community, the importance of judicial ethics has been emphasized, even regarded as one of the signs of the existence of the legal profession. Ancient China's moral requirements for judicial officials had both similarities with the modern era and unique content. Through an analysis of these aspects, one can see both the of judicial power in the entire feudal state power system and its incompleteness in development.
Chapter 7 analyzes judicial culture and its continuity in modern times, such as the unclear boundaries of the legal profession group, the unique nature of legal thinking that cannot be completely separated from administrative thinking, the lack of professional self-discipline, and the inability of judicial ethics to fully distinguish themselves from life ethics due to the lack of institutional support.