Legal history

hsy12

Charles Dickens的小说，充满了法律相关的内容，因为他自己曾经做过law clerk，court reporter等等。

在Great Expectations里，有一个情节是有个神秘人物雇请律师帮助主人公孤儿Pip成为gentleman。
记得在Jane Eyre里，Jane的叔叔John Eyre因为膝下没有子女，也请了律师把身后的遗产传给Jane。

两个故事是发生在1800s的英国，在那个时候，英国人就有这些legal services。而我的印象里，那时候的中国哪有这些法律概念和服务？

在网上搜索了一些网页，发现中国的法律受儒家思想Confucianism的影响，人们希望通过传统的思想道德观念来约束自己的行为，所以他们想建立一个没有法律的和谐乌托邦。

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_law
The basic premise of Confucianism is the idea that human beings are fundamentally good. （人之初性本善）With this optimistic view on human potential, Confucius advocates for ruling through li – traditional customs, mores, and norms – which allow people to have a sense of shame and become humane people with good character, rather than through government regulations and penal law. The idea is that people will internalize the acceptable norms and only take proper actions. This will not only lead to a harmonious social order, but it will also provide the additional benefit of improving an individual’s inner character and the overall quality of the society.

https://www.victoria.ac.nz/law/r ... k-15,-2009/Feng.pdf
Confucian Adjudication Prized Harmony above all ElseHarmony is  the highest value of Chinese culture. Through the thousands of years of Chinese history, Chinese society has held harmony as the highest ideal in dispute resolution. When  adjudicating disputes, ancient officials focused on avoiding lawsuits and settling arguments through mediation. They strove to achieve the Confucian utopia of "a society without lawsuits."

西方的法律条文被认为是在1839年由林则徐主持逐渐引入中国的。
The introduction and translation of Western legal texts into Chinese is believed to have been started under the auspices of Lin Zexu in 1839.

wikipedia里有一段关于18世纪传统中国法律系统和欧洲法律系统的对比。起先中国传统法律系统被认为是落后的，可是更近的一些研究对中国传统法律系统有了更多的正面看法。
Researchers of the early and mid-20th century tended to compare the traditional Chinese legal system to then contemporary systems, finding the former to be backward. However, more recent research compared the 18th-century Chinese legal system to European systems of the 18th century, resulting in a far more positive view of traditional Chinese law.

Dickens的这句话是不是可以理解为儒家思想影响下的中国传统法律系统的“优越”之处？？
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/opinion/dickens-v-lawyers.html
At 32 he filed his first suit against a pirate publisher（那时候就有版权的问题了）. Dickens told a friend afterward that “it is better to suffer a great wrong than to have recourse to the much greater wrong of the law.”

hsy12

Surprising to most Westerners is the fact that China had little companion codification of its civil law. Indeed, China believed heavily in using criminal law as a means to control public morality. Some of their historic legal beliefs strike as odd such as the requirement of a confessions before conviction could follow. This led to torture. Another was the common use of public shame, not unlike the medieval English stock.

http://www.duhaime.org/LawMuseum ... y--Part-3.aspx#Qing

hsy12

似乎从这点上也可以看出为什么中国人那么讲面子吧？而西人似乎不那么在意别人怎么看自己，更加我行我素。
这是否更进一步说明了为什么中国人更缺乏创造力？因为无形的条条框框约束了我们？