Comments on“Pure Jurisprudence” and Its Inspiration to Legal Order in Present-day China

“Pure Jurisprudence”, advocated by Kelson, is the major school in Western analytical Positivist jurisprudence. Its most fundamental feature is give ultimate priority to the research methodology of analytical positivism, excluding all subjective elements in legal science, emphasizing that efficiency is the main characteristics of legal norms and that written laws and regulations must be obeyed. Ever since the late Qing Dynasty, legal modernization in China has been influenced immensely by analytical positivist jurisprudence. However, there have been serious changes in legal positivism in contemporary legal research since the late 1970s. In the process of constructing the legal order in contemporary China, the methodology of analytical positivism in its original sense, represented by “Pure Jurisprudence”, and legal efficiency, are very instructive.