An Analysis Of "Pu Shi Ming Fa" In Qin And Han Dynasties

To make laws public is the meaning item of "Ming Fa" from books in the Pre-Qin Period,which is used for expressing the requirement or proposition of Legal popularization.Legalists in the Pre-Qin Period believe that there are five reasons for making the Legal public.Firstly,it is determined by the attribute of law itself.Secondly,it can make people pursue the way of ruling a nation of ancient wise monarch.Thirdly,it is an important measure to achieve national prosperity.Fourthly,it can effectively maintain the ruling order and make the people in every class be a rule and honest person.Fifthly,it can promote the justice of law enforcement.The specific measures include the following: promulgating a decree step by step through administrative levels;setting up professional judge to preach;"Regarding the laws as instruction" and "regarding the officials as teachers".The book of Zhou Li outside the Legalist works also retained a lot of thoughts that promulgate the laws and let people know the laws in the period of Warring States or even earlier.It is mainly reflected in the whole set of fussy procedures of promulgating laws,hanging the laws on the imperial palace and understanding of the laws,and it is also reflected in making the punishment public for a particular purpose during the penalty process."Ming Fa" which the elites of ideology advocated has been transformed into government-led "Pu Shi Ming Fa" to the Qin and Han Dynasties successfully.First of all,under the unified system of centralism,the laws that legislated by the country were promulgated from the central government to the local government gradually through a well-established administrative level system.When facing the ordinary people at the very bottom,it still needs to explain to them.Secondly,the research of the laws and decrees are related to be an official.On the one hand,people who are familiar with the laws and decrees can serve as a certain official.On the other hand,the government listed whether people are familiar with the laws and decrees into the contents of the official assessment.Thirdly,the last item caused the society of Qin dynasty to experience a short official monopoly actively and generally,and then the society came into the universal phenomenon of the coexistence of official and private teaching in Han Dynasty.There is also a greater impact way that compiles the simple legal common sense into the primary school textbooks.Finally,when the criminal is executed,reading or publicizing the counts of prisoners can also play a role in the legal education of the crowd.During the Qin and Han Dynasties,the government made great efforts to promote the popularization of the law.Its effect is limited to the scarcity of historical materials,so the researchers nowadays can only make some speculations slightly.The conventional words,even the stylized words,like "such as the law" and "according to law",shows the popularity of laws of administrative ideas and the insistence of principle of declaring somebody guilty according to the laws.Ought to say,the effects in establishing legal authority or legal sense are considerable,and people generally obey the principle of "all according to the law" voluntarily.People of different identities who grasp the specific laws are not the same.As the emperor of the supreme ruler,their relatively familiar laws are undoubtedly those of the imperial edict that let the officials write according to their own meaning.The officials who work for the emperor to manage the people,especially civil servants,have more legal quality.Some of them also casually cite the original provisions of the law.Relatively speaking,the generals have less legal quality than the civil servants.Some of them can hardly understand the law.However,the ordinary people at the very bottom are concerned about those laws that can maintain their own interests and related to their own special identity and civil conduct.