Time Magazine’s 100 Best Children’s Books of All Time [Click book’s cover image or title to go to its Amazon web-page. Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate this website would earn from qualifying purchases through links to Amazon.]
Allard, Harry. Miss Nelson is Missing
Anno, Mitsumasa. Anno’s Journey
Atwater, Richard and Florence. Mr. Popper’s Penguins
Averill, Esther. Jenny and the Cat Club
来源：最高人民法院网，发布时间：2017-01-14 18:47:27。《人民法院报》2017年1月15日，第1、4版。
全国高级法院院长会议在京召开 周强强调
扎实做好人民法院各项工作
以优异成绩迎接党的十九大胜利召开
1月14日上午，全国高级法院院长会议在北京开幕，最高人民法院党组书记、院长周强出席会议并讲话强调,要深入学习贯彻习近平总书记系列重要讲话精神，牢固树立“四个意识”，坚决维护以习近平同志为核心的党中央权威，增强忧患意识和责任感，按照“努力让人民群众在每一个司法案件中感受到公平正义”的目标要求，坚持司法为民、公正司法，全面深化司法体制改革和信息化建设，努力建设过硬队伍，进一步加强基层基础工作，更好维护社会大局稳定、促进社会公平正义、保障人民安居乐业，以优异成绩迎接党的十九大胜利召开。
1986年，最高人民法院在六届人大四次会议工作报告中说：“在经济活动领域内，一些干部……把法律当成保护本地区局部利益的工具。……如果法院判决本地应偿还外地的债务，就不高兴，就指责法院‘胳膊肘往外拐’；甚至阻挠法院对一些案件的受理、判决和执行。”这是第一次在国家最高议事议政仪式上提出地方保护主义话题。1988年七届全国人大一次会议上，以上现象在最高法院的工作报告中被正式称谓为“地方保护主义”。[1]自1988年开始到2001年的历年全国人大会上的最高法院工作报告，都批评“地方保护主义”对法院审判、执行的干预。对当代中国民商事审判进行观察的西方学者，在审判不公、法官滥用权力的归因上，亦多认为系出于体制所导致的司法地方保护主义（local protectionism）。[2]对于司法地方保护主义的批评，逐渐演化为一种控制性话语形态，成为主导1990年代末启动司法体制改革以来，直到晚近，对中国司法政治治理进行重构的基本叙事。
从地方保护主义叙事形成迄今三十年，已沉淀出一个可进行感知的较完整图像，从而使得对地方保护主义话语形态进行评析，成为可经验检验、测证的事件。本文从地方保护主义发生的制度结构切入，试图表达和论证以下事实：地方保护主义叙事来自于1990年代初期之前的印象。1992年后，剧烈的变革所产生的制度外部性，使得地方党委、人大、政府，进行地方保护主义的激励和所享有的支配力不断衰退；从当事人的案件收益、寻租成本、搜寻成本以及各项风险量值来分析可清楚的判知，并非地方党委、人大，而是上级法院，是当事人寻求对案件进行干预的优先选择，持续三十年的司法地方保护主义叙事遮蔽了该事实。对于司法改革这一总前提的厘清、查勘，是司法改革政策设计再出发的起点。
参考：《经济学家》年度最佳图书：2011；2012；2013；2014；2015；2017；2018。
High fliers: Books of the Year 2016
The best books of 2016 are about China, language, microbes, hereditary power, inequality and medieval manuscripts
Politics and current affairs
China’s Future. By David Shambaugh. Polity; 195 pages; $19.95 and £14.99
No country has modernised its economy without also becoming a democracy. A respected American political scientist asks whether China can break the mould.
2004年11月公安部南京会议（全国侦破命案工作会议）上，公安部认可此前湖北、河南等地所作的尝试，正式提出“命案必破”口号。[1]此后，媒体和学者对之提出了一系列批评，认为“命案必破”要求过高，是浮夸；而且在“命案必破”这样一个不切实际的口号压力下，必然刺激办案民警进行刑讯逼供，从而侵犯犯罪嫌疑人的权利。在近期，媒体、学界密切注意一些刑事错案，刑诉法、刑法、司法制度甚至法理学领域的很多学者都投入相当多的学术精力对错案的问题进行关注，在这些学者对于错案的归因上，也大多诉诸于“命案必破”，将“命案必破”作为错案发生的一个重要诱导因素。[2]虽然公安部刑侦局局长何挺公开亮明态度，表示“命案必破不会引发逼供”，但并未作出有力的回应，而只是声称：各相关执法部门为“命案必破”设置了两道关卡即检察机关直接监督和公安机关内部的完整的案件质量审核把关机制，特别是命案实行的“一长双责制”或者说“三条防线”即检察机关监督＋案件质量审核＋增加办案透明度，可以避免错案发生。[3]
由本文的分析切入思路来看，就“命案必破”话题而言的批评文字，对于公安机关的分析和评价都是采用了一种整体论（holism）的方式，将公安机关内部视为一个“黑箱”，将公安机关作为一个“质点”或“单子”（monad）[4]，而不是能够细致地进入公安机关内部，感知公安机关作为一个由各个分支单元部门组成的组织在如何运作。因此就无法考量执政党和上级公安机关如何对于公安组织内部进行信息识别和提供激励，进而没有力量分析公安机关内部的组织变化如何影响作为一个整体的组织的外部绩效。 而这恰恰是分析公安机关提出“命案必破”口号的来由以及“命案必破”在制度上何以可能的关键点。
本文观点认为，“命案必破”口号提出后，在其统领下又相继出台了一批据以实现该口号的具体制度、规则[5]，从而对整个普通刑事案件的侦查工作和公安机关的机构、资源配置都产生了极大影响，已经成为“严打”方针之下一个极为重要的中观层面的刑事政策。本文试图重新对这一问题进行审视，从“结构－组织”维度来看待行动主体的外显行为，但是方法上大抵秉持陈寅恪所说的“同情的理解”，首先对“命案必破”进行尽可能“主位的”（emic）分析，然后提出本文的认识。
中国现代的学科专业分类出自西方。对于学科专业化，沃勒斯坦认为：“十九世纪思想史的首要标志就在于知识的学科化和专业化。”“多元学科的创立乃是基于这样一个信念：由于现实被合理地分成了一些不同的知识群，因此系统化研究便要求研究者掌握专门的技能，并借助于这些技能去集中应对多种多样、各自独立的现实领域。”[1]就法学而言，恩格斯认为：“随着立法进一步发展为复杂和广泛的整体，出现了新的社会分工的必要性：一个职业法学家阶层形成起来了，同时也就产生了法学。”[2]这产生了三个逻辑递进的后果：
1、职业法学家阶层产生后，对自有利益的认识从自发到自觉，推动着法学进行有意识地固化和扩张，对于通过法学学历和经历所表现出的专业化，与其他学科竞争；
2、法学的学科化、专业化确立后，法律职业主义认为专业知识的训练符号，与该专业领域的职业实践者，两者之间应具有一一对应的映射关系，否则即是反现代化；
3、英语中学科（discipline）同时具有的含义是纪律/规训，选择某一个学科，意味着接受该学科既成知识体系规范的纪律约束或规训。
参考：《经济学家》年度最佳图书：2011；2012；2013；2014；2016；2017；2018。
The best books this year are about North Korea, Detroit, Nagasaki and being a pilot
Politics and current affairs
Near and Distant Neighbours: A New History of Soviet Intelligence. By Jonathan Haslam. Oxford University Press; 400 pages; £20
A detailed appraisal of how the Soviet Union handled undercover operations from the communist revolution in 1917 until the end of the cold war. The most gripping chapters focus on the chaos that was unleashed by Josef Stalin.
1990年代末以来司法体制改革的基本叙事前提是反司法地方保护主义，作为反司法地方保护主义对策，一是将两审制改为三审制，二是调整人民法院设置，突破按行政区划设置的模式[1]。增设跨区划法院，不仅是突破政权底部的乡、县、市，而主要是在政权上部设立跨省级区划的大区分院，作为最高人民法院的派出机构，这被认为是法院设置体制改革的最终目标。[2]在现当代中国司法史上，法院层级调整和审级变化，不是孤立事件，而是互为因果、彼此正相关的一个主题的两个侧面。跨省的最高人民法院派出机构这一方案，在2014年走入制度实践，对三审制的讨论，也形成热潮。区别于以往司法改革对微观工作机制的改变，这是对当代司法体制的突破。
当代司法体制的架构，由1982年《宪法》及稍后修改的《人民法院组织法》确立，这两法是跃过1975、1978年《宪法》和组织法，以1954年《宪法》和组织法为基础拟定[3]。决策中枢在1954年对1949-1954年一届政协期间的政治、司法体制等大量制度进行废弃、重新设计，其中即包括撤销1949-1954年之间，曾经在司法体制中存在的跨省的最高人民法院大区分院，以及废弃三审制，所以一届政协期间被称为过渡政体。然而，六十年一甲子，大区分院制度轮回。两相辉映，落下一个设问：为何大区分院在1954年宪制框架下会被撤销，这对中国司法体制的塑造产生什么影响？
由此，1949-1954年期间的制度规范和实践，即成为考察当代司法体制的制度史前史。本文即对这一历史过程的制度史细节进行分析，体察中国司法的构造与司法政治关切所在。制度演化，由无数历史细节连缀、冲决而发生，本文繁密的历史事件和细节所传递的制度史线索是：
Richard Posner. By William Domnarski. Oxford University Press 2016. ISBN: 9780199332311; 0199332312.
Judge Richard Posner is one of the great legal minds of our age, on par with such generation-defining judges as Holmes, Hand, and Friendly. A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and the principal exponent of the enormously influential law and economics movement, he writes provocative books as a public intellectual, receives frequent media attention, and has been at the center of some very high-profile legal spats. He is also a member of an increasingly rare breed-judges who write their own opinions rather than delegating the work to clerks-and therefore we have unusually direct access to the workings of his mind and judicial philosophy.
Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary. By Richard A. Posner. Harvard University Press 2016. ISBN: 9780674286030; 0674286030.
Judges and legal scholars talk past one another, if they have any conversation at all. Academics couch their criticisms of judicial decisions in theoretical terms, which leads many judges—at the risk of intellectual stagnation—to dismiss most academic discourse as opaque and divorced from reality. In Divergent Paths, Richard Posner turns his attention to this widening gap within the legal profession, reflecting on its causes and consequences and asking what can be done to close or at least narrow it.
The shortcomings of academic legal analysis are real, but they cannot disguise the fact that the modern judiciary has several serious deficiencies that academic research and teaching could help to solve or alleviate. In U.S. federal courts, which is the focus of Posner’s analysis of the judicial path, judges confront ever more difficult cases, many involving complex and arcane scientific and technological distinctions, yet continue to be wedded to legal traditions sometimes centuries old. Posner asks how legal education can be made less theory-driven and more compatible with the present and future demands of judging and lawyering.
Confucian Humanism and Theodicy
Weigang Chen, Philosophy and Religious Studies Program, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, The University of Macau, Av. Padre Tomás Pereira Taipa, Macau. E-mail: wgchen@umac.mo.
Abstract
This article explores the puzzle of Confucian “divine humanism” in light of the Weberian scheme of religious rationalization. Relating the Confucian humanistic orientation to current discussions of the phenomenon of “amoral familism,” I argue that the Confucian puzzle calls into question the cornerstone of Max Weber’s comparative religion, namely his influential contrast between religious legitimation and theodicy. In particular, the puzzle suggests that in pre-Confucian China, there was no legitimate cosmic-social world order to which Confucianism managed to adjust, let alone to affirm. As a matter of fact, it was the Confucian solution to the problem of theodicy that laid the foundation for the legitimacy of the ethical polity. Hence, inverting what Weber and neo-Weberian theorists have asserted about the religious breakthroughs in the Axial Age, theodicy constituted the religious prerequisite for political legitimation.
80:4 Journal of the American Academy of Religion 932-970 (2012).
Read/download the Full Text [PDF] of this article.
美籍华人李世默先生在他的宏文 “The Life of the Party” 中不吝笔墨，用了相当的篇幅论仇和：
There are also thousands of policy experiments that rise up from the local level. The competitive government job market gives capable local officials incentives to take risks and differentiate themselves from the pack. Among the 2,326 party representatives who attended the 18th Party Congress, one such standout was Qiu He, who is vice party secretary of Yunnan Province. At the congress, Qiu was selected as an alternate member of the Central Committee, putting the 55-year-old maverick near the top of the nation’s political establishment. Qiu is the ultimate political entrepreneur. Born into poverty in rural China, Qiu watched two of his eight siblings die of childhood illness and malnutrition. After taking the national college entrance exam, China’s great equalizer, he was able to attend university. When he entered the work force, he held several low-level civil service jobs before being appointed party secretary of Shuyang County, in northern Jiangsu Province, in the 1990s. With a peasant population of 1.7 million and an annual per capita GDP of only $250 (less than one-fifth the national average), Shuyang was one of the poorest rural areas in the country. The county also suffered from the worst crime rate in the region and endemic government corruption.
Qiu carried out a broad range of risky and controversial policy experiments that, if they failed, would have sunk his political career. His first focus was Shuyang’s floundering economy. In 1997, Qiu initiated a mandatory municipal bond purchase program. The policy required every county resident to purchase bonds to fund much-needed infrastructure development. The genius of the plan was twofold. First, he could not have raised the funds through taxes because, at his level, he had no taxation authority. Second, the mandatory bond program offered the citizens of Shuyang something taxes would not have: yes, they were required to buy the bonds, but they eventually got their money back, with interest. Qiu also assigned quotas to almost every county government official for attracting commercial investments. To support their efforts, in addition to building up the area’s infrastructure, Qiu offered favorable tax rates and cheap land concessions to businesses. In just a few years, thousands of private enterprises sprang up and transformed a dormant, centrally planned rural community into a vibrant market economy.
Qiu’s second focus was combating corruption and mistrust between the population and the government. In the late 1990s, he instituted two unprecedented measures to make the selection of officials more open and competitive. One was to post upcoming official appointments in advance of the final decisions to allow for a public comment period. The other was the introduction of a two-tier voting system that enabled villagers to vote among party members for their preferred candidates for certain positions. The local party committee then picked between the top two vote getters.
Qiu initially met tremendous resistance from the local bureaucracy and population. But today, he is credited with turning one of the country’s most backward regions into a vibrant urban center of commerce and manufacturing. Other poor regions have adopted many of his economic policy experiments. Moreover, the public commenting period has been widely adopted across China. Competitive voting is finding its way into ever-higher levels of the party hierarchy. Qiu has been personally rewarded, too, moving rapidly up the ladder: to vice governor of Jiangsu Province, mayor of Kunmin, vice party secretary of Yunnan Province, and now an alternate member of the Central Committee.
Eric X. Li, “The Life of the Party: The Post-Democratic Future Begins in China,” 92 Foreign Affairs 34 (2013).
2016年12月15日人民网新闻：云南原副书记仇和受贿2千多万 被判处14年6个月
Confucian Marxism: A Reflection on Religion and Global Justice. Brill 2013. ISBN: 9789004228986.
Buttressed by an autocratic system, China’s colossal economic growth over the past decades seems to have had the paradoxical effect of undermining the foundation of Western domination but at the same time invigorating Eurocentricism. In particular, it highlights the current relevance of the central conviction of Weber’s Orient: the absence of civic roots in non-Western societies will create a kind of “uncivic” capitalist system in which one has no choice but to seek to compensate for instabilities through authoritarian institutions. Does this mean that the West may alone afford to harmonize political stability with the universalistic ideal of justice as the basic structure of society? If not, how then is it possible to develop a notion of the primacy of social justice that transcends the limits of liberal democracy? This book aims at addressing these timely questions by drawing on “Confucian Marxism”—a distinctive perspective on civil society.
很多人（上至 Bill Gates，下至在下）喜欢阅读《经济学家》杂志，不是没有缘由的。比如这篇针对《剑桥资本主义史》（The Cambridge History of Capitalism）的短评，开头结尾都写得有声有色：
ECONOMICS publishing has recently undergone a great democratisation. High-quality academic writing was once confined to a handful of journals, mostly accessible in academic libraries. The journals still exist, but mostly serve to influence university hiring decisions. Writing has overwhelmingly gone online, where ambitious academics release free working papers, plug them on Twitter, and watch the discussion unfold. Though this democratisation has critics, it has vastly expanded the audience for economics writing.
This, in turn, may prime the market for another throwback: the authoritative collection of essays. For readers whose interest has been piqued online, the anthology provides an appealing way to learn about a range of subjects. “The Cambridge History of Capitalism” is an excellent example of the genre. …
[The Cambridge History of Capitalism is] a thoughtful account of capitalism. Rarely is economic history so accessible. Yet it is unclear who is meant to read it. University libraries will buy a copy, but the material is not especially rigorous by academic standards and is better suited to the ordinary reader. The price, however, is not. At £150, the work may not appeal to the casual economics readers who have benefited most from the online revolution. The publishers will have their reasons: large margins may be earned on limited sales to libraries and rich bankers. There is talk of a paperback version. But the upshot, for the moment at least, is that most readers will turn elsewhere for their economic history. That’s capitalism for you.
The Posner on Posner series began on November 24, 2014 and ended with the Afterword on January 5, 2015. Below is a hyperlinked list of all the posts.
Table of Contents
Forthcoming: Richard Posner (Oxford University Press, Spring, 2015) by William Domnarski.