Western and East Asian Systems of Law and Justice

Political Science: Western and East Asian Systems of Law and Justice
Name
Institutional Affiliation
Political Science: Western and East Asian Systems of Law and Justice
Introduction
The influence of Confucianism on East Asian legal and justice system has been studied by many historical, philosophical, and political scholars on the origin of the Chinese legal system and compares it with the Western legal culture. Confucian once wrote that he succeeded in litigation by deterring the process and showing partiality was the way to practice law. These sentiments have till today influenced the practice of law in East Asia. The western system practices distributive justice where fairness is distributed at the cost and benefits of fair cooperation while the Eat Asian system or confusion law emphasizes on restorative justice. Confucian law stresses on the importance of restoring broken human relations such as families and commercial partnerships. In this system, courts act as mediators and arbitrators of conflict. The process of law in Western and East Asian systems tends to take different directions. In the West, litigation of formal rights claims adversarial justice defined in the American law. However, the East Asian process of justice is a mix of rule application and moral teaching (pedagogy) of moral rightness. This system employs the rule application of codified laws with moral explication. In terms legal procedures, only the Western system apply neutral or equal procedures and evidence is treated as objective. There is no bias or favor of relationships. This important aspect reflects the difference between the West and East Asian system of law and justice that view the unit of law inversely. In the West, citizens are considered to be rights-bearing individuals while in East Asia, there are strong institutional relationships where individual are classified as members of interdependent social roles such as partners, adversaries, fathers, and sons. In determining equity, the Western system uses a substantive consideration of fairness, which resembles the Confucian moralizing law. The law is regarded as critical to economic transactions, but subordinate to human feelings in the Western system of law and justice. This paper compares and contrasts the Western and Asian systems of law and justice while recognizing the influence of Confucianism in shaping the legal culture of China and the East Asia.
The Western system of law and justice takes the approach of distributive justice involving the assessment of the justice of the distribution of desired outcomes across people. In theories that support distributive justice will seek to allocate resources to society on the basis of fair principles. However, the process of identifying the fair principles has been under fierce criticism and many theories have sought to incorporate Lockean and utilitarian principles. One of the most influential works over the last century is the John Rawl’s definition of ideal contractarian theory to explain distributive shares. In this definition, Rawl’s views on the distributive justice system is that which allocates benefits and burdens of social life predicated on what rational beings would choose out of ignorance that prevents them from ...