Legal Systems

13 Highlights | 11 Notes

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 111

While some early writers argued against making the law code publicly available, that policy does not seem to have been followed, save possibly under the Song dynasty.

you don't need to know

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 146

There were three sentences that were actually rather than only nominally capital: Strangulation before the assizes, decapitation before the assizes, and death by slicing (“the death of a thousand cuts”). Strangulation was considered a less severe punishment than decapitation since mutilation of the body was held to have undesirable post-mortem consequences.

milder execution

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 155

One possible answer is that cosmic balance required the payment of a life for a life, but it could be a nominal life.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 173

It was, for example, a particularly serious offense to kill several members of the same family. In one case a defendant found guilty of doing so was sentenced to severe punishment despite the fact that the men he killed had attacked him and his companions and one of them had just killed his father.

overdid it?

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 183

That again could be interpreted as a policy driven by the fear that if balance was not maintained by punishing someone for a violation of the cosmic rules, the result might be an increased risk of natural catastrophes.

must please Heaven

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 192

Where the offense could not be fitted into any category in the code, the court could find the defendant guilty of doing what ought not to be done25 or of violating an Imperial decree—not an actual decree but one that the Emperor would have made had the matter been brought to his attention.

had the Emperor been asked

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 276

As almost any college professor will have observed, many students memorize as much as they need to pass the final exam and forget most of it as rapidly as possible thereafter.

cram and drop

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 279

He may be no better qualified than before, but he has better evidence of his qualifications.

Highlight (Yellow) | Location 424

His job was doing justice. The plaintiff was merely the person who had brought an instance of injustice to his attention.

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 426

The Japanese government wished to maintain the existing legal system. To do so it had to discover what it was.

what do you guys do?

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 952

Jewish law may be the best-recorded legal system in the history of the world; there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of pages of surviving primary sources covering about twenty-five hundred years.

2500 years

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 992

Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Location 1097

A second problem faced by a system based on a fixed and authoritative legal text is how to change rules unsuited to current conditions or add new rules to deal with issues not covered in the original.