Judgment is the general name of the judgment documents or quasi-judgment documents written by the magistrate according to the actual case or the examiners taking the exam in the legal system of China about punishing the criminal suspects (today's "criminals") or solving civil disputes.

The judgment has a long history, such as: "... the initial punishment, I should whip you 1000 and give you a' touch' punishment." Since I forgave you, I should give you a thousand strokes to avoid your punishment. Now it is even more Amnesty, with a whip of 500 and a fine of 300 copper. " It was a judge named Bai Yang's father who sentenced a man named Niu Mu.

The system of selecting officials in the Tang Dynasty directly contributed to the maturity of the verdict itself. During the Sui and Tang Dynasties, the judge was one of the subjects selected by the official department, which lasted until the demise of the Qing Dynasty. According to the "General Code" Volume 15 election for three years, "when the official department selects talents, it must kiss its people and cover its official affairs, and then take the example of counties and counties to ask them, try to break them and see if they can, so it is also a sentence. There are many accusations about the candidate, and the case is shallow and short, which is not difficult. It is based on the classical ancient meaning, assuming that A and B make it judge. Today's people come to use it, but they don't have enough questions, but they ask the hidden meaning of books and songs, fearing that people can know it. "

During the Song and Ming Dynasties, officials were selected by books, which further developed the verdict. Since then, many judgments have been handed down, including Wang Wei's Collection, Bai Juyi's Collection of Changqing, and Hai Rui's Collection of Hai Rui in Ming Dynasty. Another example is Zhang Kun's "The Judgment of Jinlong Fengsui" in the Tang Dynasty.

The maturity of the judgment has also become one of the signs of the existence and development of the legal system in China. After entering the modern society of westerners, the writing of judgment has been greatly impacted by the brutal plunder of the west. During the period of Xuan Tong, the Principles for Criminal Examiners compiled by Xiao Yi and Shen Jiaben made uniform provisions on the writing of criminal and civil judgments. Criminal judgment must specify the following elements: (1) the name, native place, age, place of residence and occupation of the criminal; (2) the facts of the crime; 3) prove the cause of the crime; (4) invoking a law; (5) Reasons for invoking the law; A civil judgment shall include: (1) the name, place of origin, age, domicile and occupation of the parties; (2) Petition; (3) Justification; (4) the reasons of the referee. Later, it evolved into a "subject-fact-cause" procedure in the Republic of China. Taiwan Province Province has reservations, but the mainland is greatly influenced by the civil law system.

Second, the classification, format and defects of contemporary judgment documents

Today's judgment documents can be roughly divided into criminal judgment, civil judgment and administrative judgment. Although there are some changes in the specific wording, the basic writing still follows the fixed procedure of "starting-bearing-turning-combining", which is either not threatening or unclear, boring and lifeless. It may have the following defects:

(1) header description is too simple. As a faithful record and summary of the litigation process, the judgment document should clearly record the main litigation process. If the first part of the judgment document does not specify the time of prosecution and court session, the case is seriously beyond the trial limit and the legal reasons are not explained, it will undermine the integrity of the proceedings and affect the openness and transparency of the trial work;

(2) Lack of analysis of facts. Case fact is a kind of legal fact, which is the judge's identification of what has happened through the analysis of litigation evidence. It is different from the objective facts and has the cognitive characteristics of judges' subjective initiative, that is, free evaluation of evidence. If only the evidence is listed, the choice of evidence is not explained, especially the evidence with differences between the opposing parties is not analyzed and certified in detail, and the reasons for certification are not clear. The use of indirect evidence to finalize the case does not discuss the close relationship between indirect evidence and evidence chain, which makes the process of evidence acceptance unable to be reflected in the judgment documents;

(3) The reasoning of the applicable law is too general. Most of the judgment documents only quote legal provisions, without clear reasons for applying the law, without giving the opinions of both parties and their reasons for applying the relevant laws, and without a detailed legal analysis of which party's opinions are adopted or not adopted by the judge and its legal basis. Or although it has the logical elements of applicable law, it lacks pertinence, and the phenomenon of formulation and conceptualization of reasoning is serious; Some materials are piled up, regardless of priorities, and reasoning is cumbersome. Some cases are more complicated and difficult, and it is not based on the specific characteristics of the case to deeply analyze why this crime is determined instead of that crime, why this law is applied instead of that law, and how to confirm the existence, size and compensation amount of the fault, thus weakening the persuasiveness of reasoning. Such a referee lacks credibility, and the judge has become a simple "law enforcement machine", which makes it difficult to highlight personal knowledge and literacy;

(4) The language used is not standardized. The most basic purpose of making judgment documents is to express the richest content with as few words as possible, and to express and judge the most direct and clear legal facts with as scientific and rigorous legal language as possible. But some refereeing documents are endless, but they digress from Wan Li. We don't object to an appropriate and small description of the primitiveness of facts, but we must never use general expressions throughout;

Ancient judgments and today's judgment documents are not concise and inefficient, and the equality of the parties is not reflected in the production. I will not analyze them here. ①

Third, the comprehensive thinking of the judgment and its enlightenment to the judgment documents.

Xu Zeng's Stylistic Discrimination in the Ming Dynasty summed up twelve specific categories of judgments since the bad Tang Dynasty: "One is the crime of science; Second, comments are allowed; Third, distinguish snow; Four times different; Fifth, the judgment department; Stay for six days; 7. Refuting the truth; Eight-day rebuttal; Reduce at the end of nine days; Sleep for ten days; 1 1 cases; Twelve prizes. " As a kind of document, the verdict has many similarities with other official documents such as epitaphs from writing to publishing.

(1) The writing of ancient documents generally requires the following steps: drafting, drafting, discussion and other stages, and judgment as a kind of document is no exception. "For life, god created, uncle discussion. Pedestrians are decorated with feathers, and Donglizi is embellished. (The Analects of Confucius) Imagine that if he didn't write the first part well in the process of writing, how could he make so many people not misunderstand?

(2) The writing of judgments generally adopts narrative and argumentative styles, requiring the author to refine words and make sentences, which requires both arts and sciences and can also be written with momentum. Wu Ne said in the word order: "According to the Tang system, there are four ways to choose candidates: one is handsome; Second, the words are correct; Three books, France and America; In four sentences, the arts and sciences are particularly long. "

(3) In the writing of the judgment, the reasoning in the paper is not empty, the method is cited, and it is thorough and thorough; Such as: "Seeing the face, learning short, forgetting righteousness, and sharing fat has been proved. The crime is hard to say ("Inscription on Crimes of Strict Punishment", page 52); In addition, in the process of writing the judgment, in addition to following the law, I also wrote it according to the moral code of "the monarch and the minister are righteous, the husband and wife are different, the young and the old are orderly, and the friends are trustworthy", which is very emotional, persuasive and has a strong nationality;

(4) Although there is no fixed format in the writing of early judgments, there are some fixed rules to follow in the use of words, such as:

"Disclosure" refers to the account of other related matters, such as stolen money, contract documents and bodies.

"Chad" and "Kande" are the most common words to read, and they are used to lead to the judgment of the case when describing the case name, such as the above example;

The "case evidence" is based on the case file, such as: Hezhou Yizhou Zhang beat four children to come to the case ... "("Chongqing Municipal Government Member Zhang Case in Ba County Za ").

Yun Yun must make up for it, and include the contents that will be missed in other documents or other links in the judgment.

(5) Stamping system: the square seal is not skewed. "When stamping, it should be steady, the direction should be accurate, correct and clear, and the position should be appropriate, so that the lower edge slightly covers the signature date, that is,' pressing the years'." ② The national emblem should not be skewed.

(6) Date writing: The date writing of the judgment often adopts the name system of the emperor. Now, the judgment document is in the Gregorian calendar year. In principle, only Arabic numerals are used, not square characters. If you use square characters, you don't need to replace "zero" with "0". Today, the date writing in the process of writing legal documents is still confusing and needs to be unified.

The judgment is based on the reasoning of Anglo-American legal system, as well as the reference to continental legal system and socialist legal system. They are often concise, carefully analyzed, meticulous, serious, supportive of justice and fair sentencing. For China, a country born out of China's legal system, critically inheriting it is very beneficial to the construction of the rule of law. From a modern perspective, it seems that the combination of Chinese and western cultures is spectacular. I hope to criticize and inherit and write today's judgment documents more perfectly.