Abstract: The restatement of the history of Chinese legal thoughts is an important aspect of the restatement of legal history. We can rediscover and restate the history of Chinese legal thoughts from four aspects: breaking through the "candied haws" retelling model, breaking through the limitations of theory of "taking criminal law as the main body of the legal system” and the theory of " Confucianization of law", and carrying out theoretical innovation by seeking truth from facts. This article adopts the method of combining macro-theoretical elucidation and specific legal thought analysis to demonstrate such important propositions as the development and changes of the idea of "integrating punishment with education", the legal study as the crystallization of the fusion of Confucianism and legal thoughts, distinguishing and understanding the legal thoughts of the pre-Qin scholars, post-Western Han Dynasty social ideological trends and legal thoughts, and distinctions between the essences and the dregs of ancient legal thoughts, puts forward suggestions on such legal thoughts as "Fundamental Principles and Laws", "the relationship between law codes and precedents", "Shihuo", "military-political Legal thought", "legislative thoughts", "fundamental law", "Constant Laws", and "the law of contingency", and revised such theoretical propositions as "treating concluded cases in ancient China as judicial precedents", "formation of the system of the legal system in Ming Dynasty from edicts to precedents", “regarding regulations in Qing Dynasty as specially referring to criminal regulations" and “the general nature of legal form", and proposes to improve the research thinking and methods, broaden the fields of research, and write a developing history of legal thoughts in China that reflects the fusion of the ideas of various schools of thought.

Keywords: History of Chinese Legal Thought; Fundamental Principles and Laws; relationship between Law codes and precedents; the Legal Thought of Shihuo; concluded cases

Author: Yang Yifan, an honorary member of the Academic Committee of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a research fellow at CASS Law Institute, and the chief expert of the Legal History Innovation Project of Northwest University.

Source: 4 (2021) ECUPL Journal, pp. 6-19.