Theme Expansion and Conscious Awareness in Methodology

Forty years on, normative theory of law in China has been kept on expanding both the broadness and depth of its research themes, and awakes gradually in consciousness of methodology. On the dimension of concept of law and basic legal concepts, studies on the nature of law began in dispute over class division and succession about law, but fused into the debate between natural law and legal positivism step by step, while the research on various basic legal concepts, especially on "rights", is keeping on deeper. As to legal methodology, there emerges such a feature that the translation went ahead. Scholars in jurisprudence have involved in every branch of methodological studies, and cooperated mutually while published intensively at the meantime. In the domain of legal ethics, authors concentrate on such topics as rule of law, the source of law-abeyance and the legal enforcement of morality. The first signs of interests on philosophy of department law have just showed. The problem of legal science manifested itself clearly in dispute between School of "Law and Social Science" on one hand, and School of "Legal Dogmatics" on the other, which produces lots of divergences in model of adjudication and legal thinking. Finally, the rise of analytical method shows the "path through skills"-nature of normative theory of law, and the direction of future development.