Abstract:

Jurisprudence in the Qing Dynasty, centered on the statutes and focused on annotating the Qing Code easier to facilitate judicial practice. Officials at different levels required an understanding the technicalities and practicality of the law, but ordinary scholars paid little attention to legal studies. In fact, legal studies were marginalized in the Qing academic system until the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns when the positive effects of the interest in legal practice led to remarkable progress in legal research. Based on their knowledge of the structure of the law, researchers actively promoted the development of legal studies. On the one hand, researchers explained the law according to the classics to enhance the status of legal studies, while the officials arbitrated legal cases using the classics. On the other hand, using the method of analyzing the Confucian classics to study difficult legal texts promoted the literary quality of legal studies. Thus, the Qing dynasty, the study of law was closely related to the study of Confucian Classics and the study of law moved closer to the study of the classics in terms of research methodologies and value concern.