Ronald Dworkin offered the legal theory which is known as a “chain enterprise”. According to this theory, throughout history, judges have, collectively, created a “law” that was designed to fulfil a specific purpose. Those judges can be seen as co-authors who, together, develop a chain-story. As such they not only create freely but also are constrained by the story made by authors, in this case judges, who have come before them. The law created by Chinese traditional judges is another case: compared with the judges mentioned by Ronald Dworkin, they have relatively narrower parameters of discretion in which they may implement a legal sentence. The limited amount of discretion available to an individual judge is due to the way in which, traditionally, the legal framework has been designed. The fact that traditional Chinese law was first conceived of as a penal code leaves little room for a judge to subjectively interpret a statute. Furthermore, because law is representative of the authority of the government, i.e. the emperor, any misinterpretation will be considered as a challenge to the supreme power. Conversely, while judges are bound by restrictive parameters with regard to the interpretation of the law, a Chinese litigation master (Songshi) who wishes to receive a favorable outcome for his client must be willing to challenge a judge’s narrow interpretation of the law. Conversely, while judges are bound by restrictive parameters with regard to the interpretation of the law, a Songshi who wishes to receive a favorable outcome for his client must be willing to challenge a judge’s narrow interpretation of the law. According to Stanley Fish’s articles that question Ronald Dworkin and Owen Fiss’ ideas about law, Fish construes that, since law is made of language, law is open to interpretations that cannot be constrained by any rules or any particular legal purposes. Stanley Fish’s idea can also be applied to the analysis of the stories of Songshi in traditional Chinese literature. The legal opinions of Songshi in traditional Chinese literature can be regarded as an unexpected event that calls for revision of the standardized concept of law propagated in legal stories. Although they are not welcome, neither by the officials and nor by society, their existence is still a phenomenon representing another version of justice different from the standardized concept of justice and can be seen as a de-structural power to the government. Hence, in this present paper the language and strategy applied by Songshi in Chinese legal stories will be analysed to see how they refute legal judgments and challenge the standardized concept of justice.
Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. However, the Nanjing Massacre still happened. Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, deliberately avoided mentioning the International Treaties in the imperial rescript of the Great East Asia War in 1937. The Nanking Massacre was carried out according to the Japanese army’s interpretation of the imperial rescript. Such a legal interpretation was rooted in the idea that Japan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan. In the film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), we can see both a justification of and an opposition to killing. In this paper I am going to show how the imperial rescript is used to justify this mass killing is and how opposing arguments are used to show its cruelty and absurdity, which is taken as a means to achieve a greater good.
Remembering the migrant identity: a comparative study of Les pieds sales, by Edem Awumey and Ru, by Kim ThúyAccording to Daniel Chartier, "migrant writing" unlike ethnic literature, immigration or immigrant literature can be defined thematically by hybridity and by its frequent use of autobiography (Chartier, 2002). Dictionnaire des écrivains émigrés au Québec 1800-1999, Nota Bene 2003 The genre of « migrant literature » refers to the literature from authors that are between two cultures and focus on the travel, the odyssée. The immigrant literature is a genre from immigrant writers who settle in another country whereas the ethnic literature explores subcultures. In this way, Literature can be seen as a composition of cultural fragments. It adjusts heterogeneous cultural fragments in order to produce literary emotions. As a matter of fact, the style is a pure cultural production where writers give a feeling of this cultural fragmentation.The concept of migrant literature appears in the Canadian context during the 1980s. It refers to the production of writers who, after immigrating to Canada, decided to settle in the province of Quebec -and to write within the framework of the province's literary institutions. Some representants of such migrant literature are for instance Ying Chen (born in Shanghaï in 1961), Felicia Mihaili (born in Bucarest in 1967) and Wajdi Mouawad (born in Lebanon). It is a trend that mixes autobiography fragments with migration experiences. We would like to analyze here this experience by focusing on two writers, Kim Thúy and Edem Awumey. Literature offers a new horizon for those migrant writers, as it gives the possibility to question the meaning or the meaningless world in which we live. Kim Thúy and Edem Awumey have written two novels that illustrate this literary genre, Les pieds sales (Awumey, 2009), and Ru (Thúy, 2009). The notion of world is taken from phenomenology, whereby world is a system of references, or signs that have a meaning for a group of people. The Migrant writing presents a clash of references where different meanings come from different worlds. There is a sense of waylessness pervading this writing (Fawkner, 1997, 87). Our hypothesis is that this migrant literature is a style related to the recollection of fragments of world. The fictional characters try to redefine a coherent world while travelling.There is an old word in French for re-membering, which is la remembrance, which exists in English too, remembrance. À la recherche du temps perdu by Proust is translated as Remembrance of things past. Remembrer is a synonym for se souvenir (remomari). In La Chanson de Roland, it is written: " Repairet lui vigur e remembrance " / la force et la mémoire lui reviennent -strength and memory come back to him. Pierre Nora, the French historian, defines a "lieu de mémoire" (a site of memory). A site of memory is a relation between memory and history in terms of symbolic rituals. In our societies, the logic of commemoration emphasizes the necessity to have a collective link betwe...
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