Chair Introduction to Chinese Law
21 March 2022 11:30-13:00 (CET)
Law School Room 3 – Zoom Streaming
Guest Lecture
Confucianism and Chinese Law: Past and Present
The general resurgence of Confucianism in Chinese society today has also been accompanied by growing calls for heightening the relevance of traditional Chinese legal culture in Chinese jurisprudence. This talk examines traditional Confucian views on law and approaches to jurisprudence, starting with a discussion of the legal thought of Confucius and Mencius (the two most important thinkers in the Confucian tradition). It then looks at Confucianism’s influence on case adjudication in the Han dynasty (206 BC – 220 AD) and Confucianism’s influence on the Tang Code in the Tang dynasty (618 – 907), which is regarded by many legal historians as the period where the process of “Confucianization of law” reached its highest point. The talk concludes with a discussion of Confucianism’s influence and impact on Chinese legal thought and Chinese law in the 20th and 21st centuries. Ultimately, I hope to show that there is very strong continuity in Chinese legal thought from antiquity up to the present day, which highlights the resilience of Confucianism in Chinese law.
Guest Speaker Norman P. Ho, Professor of Law, Peking University School of Transnational Law.
Norman P. Ho’s research interests, broadly speaking, are in legal theory and legal history. More specifically, he writes in the areas of premodern Chinese legal history and legal theory, comparative jurisprudence, property theory, and Asian-American jurisprudence. He also previously taught as a lecturer in the University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law and has served as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Chinese Law (University of Hong Kong) and as a visiting associate professor and Asian Law Institute Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore Faculty of Law. By affiliation, Professor Ho also serves as an honorary fellow of the University of Hong Kong’s Asian Institute of International Financial Law and as an affiliated scholar in the Transnational Legal History Group of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Center for Comparative and Transnational Law. He received his A.B. and A.M. degrees from Harvard University and his J.D. from New York University School of Law, where he received the Howard L. Greenberger Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Comparative Law.
Scientific Coordinator: Ivan Cardillo Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Trento University.
Palazzo di Giurisprudenza, via Verdi 53 – 38122 Trento
