1、Lesson One: Legal System 法律制度英属殖民地时期(the Period of the English Colonies)和美利坚合众国时期(the Period of the United States)。公诉制度(public prosecution)美国属于普通法系(Common Law Legal System)分散制(decentralization)为原则；以判例法(case law)为主体。零散的无系统(fragmental nosystem)。成文法(written law)或制定法(statutory law)，遵从前例(stare decisisPart One The United States is at once a very new nation and a very old nation. It is a new nation compared with many other countries, and it is new, too, in the sense that it is constantly being renewed
2、by the addition of new elements of population and of new States. But in other senses it is old. It is the oldest of the new nations-the first one to be made out of an Old World colony. It has the oldest written constitution, the oldest continuous federal system, and the oldest practice of selfgovernment of any nation.美国既是一个非常新的国家也是一个非常老的国家。与许多别的国家相比它是一个新的国家。同时，它还因新人口成分和新州的加入而持续更新，在此意义上，它也是新国家。但是在其它的意义上它是老国家。它是最老的“新”国家第一个由旧大陆殖民地脱胎而出的国家。它拥有最古老的成文宪法、最古老的持续的联邦体制以及最古老的民族自治实践。One of the most interesti
3、ng features of Americas youth is that the whole of its history belongs in the period since the invention of the printing press. The whole of its history is, therefore, recorded: indeed, it is safe to say that no other major nation has so comprehensive a record of its history as has the United States, for events such as those that are lost in the legendary past of Italy or France or England are part of the printed record of the United States. And the American record is not only comprehensive; it
4、is immense. It embraces not only the record of the colonial era and of the Nation since 1776, but of the present fifty States as well, and the intricate network of relationships between States and Nation. Thus, to take a very elementary example, the reports of the United States Supreme Court fill some 350 volumes, and the reports of some States are almost equally voluminous: the reader who wants to trace the history of law in America is confronted with over 5,000 stout volumes of legal cases.美国的
5、年轻（性）有一个很有意思的特点就是它的历史肇始于印刷机发明之后。因此它的整个历史都得以记录下来：确实可以很有把握地说，任何其它国家都没有像美国这样全面的历史记录，因为像在意大利、法国或者英国过去的传说中湮没的那样的事件在美国都成了有文字记载的历史之一部分。而且其记录不仅全面，还非常浩繁。不仅包括这个国家自1776年以来的殖民时期的记录，还有当前五十个州以及各州和联邦（nation）之间错综复杂的关系网络的历史记录。因此，据一个非常简单的例子，美国最高法院判例汇编有大约350卷，而一些州的判例汇编也几乎有同样多的卷数：想研究美国法律史的读者要面对的是超过5000巨卷的司法案例。No one document, no handful of documents, can properly be said to reveal the character of a people or of their government. But when hundreds and thousands of documents strike a consistent note, over more than
6、a hundred years, we have a right to say that is the keynote. When hundreds and thousands of documents address themselves in the same ways, to the same overarching problems, we have a right to read from them certain conclusions which we can call national characteristics.我们不能说一个文件或几个文件就能揭示出一国人民或其政府的特性。但如果横跨一百多年的千百万个文件敲出始终如一的音调，我们就有理由说这就是其主调。当千百万个文件都以同样的方式去解决同样的中心问题，我们就有理由从中得出可以被称为国民特定的确定结论。Part TwoThe American legal system, like the English, is methodologically mainly a case law system. Most field
7、s of private law still consist primarily of case law and the extensive and steadily growing statutory law continues to be subject to binding interpretation through case law. Knowledge of the case law method as well as of the technique of working with case law therefore is of central importance for an understanding of American law and legal methodology.同英国一样，美国法律制度从方法论上来说主要是一种判例法制度。许多私法领域仍然主要是由判例法构成，广泛而不断增长的制定法一直受制于有约束力的（解释制定法的）判例法。因此，判例法方法的知识以及使用判例法的技巧对于理解美国法律和法律方法是极其重要的。The Common Law is histor
8、ically the common general law - with supremacy over local law-which was decreed by the itinerant judges of the English royal court. The enforcement of a claim presupposed the existence of a special form of action, a writ, with the result that the original common law represented a system of actions similar to that of classical Roman law. If a writ existed (in 1227) a claim could be enforced; there was no recourse for a claim without a writ, the claim did not exist. This system became inflexible w
9、hen the Provisions of Oxford (1258) prohibited the creation of new writs, except for the flexibility which the writ upon the case allowed and which later led to the development of contract and tort law. 从历史的角度来看，普通法就是由英国皇家法院的巡回法官的判决所得出的普通的一般法优于地方法。采纳或执行某项诉讼请求是以存在法院令状这种特殊形式的诉为前提的，而这就使最初的普通法表现为由类似于古罗马法的“诉”所构成的体系。如果存在令状（于1227年），诉讼请求就可以被采纳或执行；没有法院令状（为前提）的诉讼请求就没有追索权，因而该诉讼请求也不存在。“牛津条例”（1285年）禁止创设除了“个案令状”之外的新令状，这种“个案令状”使该制度变得较为灵活了，而且导致了后来合同和侵权法的发展。The narrow limits of the forms of action and the limited recourse they provided led to the development of equity law and equity case law. Equity, in its general meaning of doing equity, deciding ex aequo et bono, was first granted by the King, and later by his Chancellor as keeper of the Kings conscience, to afford relief in hardship cases. In the fifteenth century, however, equity law and equity case law developed into an independent legal system and judiciary (Court of Chancery) wh
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