Facts Recognition and Legal Inference in Song Dynasty Judicature

The judicature judgment in Song Dynasty took seriously the “distinction between right and wrong”, which included two resorts of being true for facts and being virtuous for value. Such a distinction was highly conscientious, and was an epoch-making progress in China’s way of the law. In the conjunction of facts and law, the judicial administrators unified both inside and outside testimonies. When the norms of judgment was comparatively fixed, they executed the covering of legal norms to life facts in mutual testimony between facts and norms, so as to reach the result of fact-fixing for the case, and to reached the final judgment based on adding the method of deduction and inference. When there was difficulties in finding norms or evidences, they sought proper legal explanation and legal duration in a dual action of “the law” and “the principle”, for the purpose of a balance of the relationship between law and social ethics and the principle of the state order, as well as showing the consciousness of “legal principle”. In the dimension of the way of thinking and the value system, the judicature in Song Dynasty took account of both seeking facts and valuing virtuousness, sought proof and reason in a dual action of “the law” and “the principle”, which had a close relationship with Zhu Xi’s rationalistic Confucian ideas.