See The Legal Culture Of The Southern Song Dynasty From Yi Jian Zhi

Yi Jian Zhi is a voluminous literary sketches written by Hongmai,a scholar in the Southern Song Dynasty.It is also a representative work of classical Chinese novels and mystery novels in the Song Dynasty.As an Chinese classical literature which reflects the realistic life at that time,it describes us a vivid image of the civil society and the middle and lower classes people.although strange things seen ordinary,Behind the absurdity is a true description of the social reality of the Song Dynasty,which reflects the ideological consciousness of the people at that time,it offers us the most lively and precious first-hand material for researching the social and legal issues of the Southern Song Dynasty.We can learn the real legal phenomena that are revelant to people lives,as well as a deeper understanding of cultural intension of legal.Since the middle Tang Dynasty,especially to the time of Song,the traditional law had a remarkable change,as a literary sketches,Yi Jian Zhi exactly showed these changes.Most of theses records in this literary,involved in various aspects of people's life.Although the contents in this book are not relatively concentrated,they contain a wide rage of legal cases and are of great value in the study of the law of the Southern Song Dynasty.Therefore,based on the previous achievements,this paper classifies,combs and interprets these legal cases mentioned in this book from various aspects of social life and different legal relations,attemptsing to investigate the legal culture of the Southern Song Dynasty in multi-angle view and restore them as truly as possible.From this we can see that the marriage system of monogamy with multiple concubines is still practiced and followed in Song Dynasty,with the development of commodity economy,the atmosphere of buying concubines is prevailing,but there are new values of women behind this phenomenon,.They gradually began to get rid of the ethics discipline and understood how to safeguard their own rights and interests through legal means,,and no longer regarded remarriage as a dissolute.During the Song Dynasty,the traditional view that women must keep their chasting,especially in the Southern Song Dynasty,has been shifed dramatically.During the Southern Song Dynasty,the tendency towards the land privatization goes deeper,and followed by the disputes about land and house became more and more frequent,which embody the improvement of citizen's legal consciousness of the Song Dynasty.Judicial officials in the Southern Song Dynasty also paid more and more attention to the increasinglycomplicated real estate dispute.while dealig with local lawsuits,they showed extraordinary wisdom and ability,they will ues different trial techniques to find the breakthrough and find out the truth for the different cases.This thinking of human feelings,reasons and the law in the prejudication model is widely prevalent,which embodies the thought of judicial officials pursuit of non-lawsuit in the Southern Song Dynasty.However,the concept of non-lawsuit need to be based on a good social order.In fact,the operation of law in real life is not perfect,in addition to the corruption of officials and the tyrannical of great power,there was full of disputes and lawsuits.After the disputes and lawsuits have occurred between the litigant parties,the most ideal state is to look for protection of the public authorities,resorts the disputes to law and looks forward to state judicial organs giving them justice,helping them to wiping out the injustice.But during the judicatory practice,the phenomenom of obvious missing of impartiality is always existing.At this time,the people naturally transferred the pursuit of justice to ghosts and gods,they subconsciously believe that there is some kind of fairness and justice,also,they believe that good will be rewarded with good,and evil with evil.In order to warn judicial officials not to kill innocent people,create unjust,and sparkplug judicial officials handle cases fairly.