On the afternoon of December 5, 2025, a lecture titled "Some Thoughts on Excellent Traditional Chinese Legal Culture" was successfully held in Conference Room 410, Xingmin Building, Xianlin Campus, Nanjing Normal University. Professor He Qinhua, former president of East China University of Political Science and Law, dean of the Institute of Legal Civilization History, president of the National Association of Foreign Legal History Research, and doctoral supervisor, was specially invited to deliver the lecture. The lecture was hosted by Professor He Baisheng from the School of Law, with guests such as Professor Dong Changchun and Hu Jingyang, an assistant researcher at the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences, participating in the discussion. Many undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students from both inside and outside the university attended the lecture.

At the beginning of the lecture, Professor He Baisheng extended a warm welcome to Professor He Qinhua and introduced his outstanding contributions in relevant research fields to the present teachers and students. Subsequently, Professor He Qinhua elaborated on the following core issues: What is excellent traditional Chinese legal culture? What is its connotation and essence? What is the value of inheritance? How should it be inherited in the contemporary era?
Professor He first defined the scope of "excellent traditional Chinese legal culture", pointing out that it encompasses the excellent traditional parts of Chinese legal culture. He elaborated on this from two aspects: the three levels of Chinese legal culture and the differentiation of legal culture and other concepts. He systematically reviewed the research achievements of legal culture in Chinese academia and, based on this, clarified the definition of legal culture. Based on this, Professor He deeply analyzed the connotation of excellent traditional Chinese legal culture from six aspects: First, the understanding of law in traditional Chinese wisdom. What is law? This is a fundamental theoretical question in the field of jurisprudence, and it has been debated for more than two thousand years in Western academia. The thoughts of schools such as Legalism, Confucianism, Mohism, and Taoism reflect the ancient people's pursuit of legal equality, openness, fairness, simplicity, and conformity to nature. After abandoning the color of absolute monarchy, these ideas still have inheritance value. Second, the Chinese legal system takes written legal codes as the cornerstone of governing the country. Some viewpoints argue that ancient Chinese written legal codes are mainly focused on criminal law and incorporate various laws, which have limited significance for modern legislation. Professor He pointed out that this view is one-sided. The Roman "Twelve Tables" and the "Corpus Juris Civilis" of the 6th century also focus on private law and incorporate various laws. Therefore, we cannot deny the contribution of ancient Chinese written legal codes just because of their "incorporation of various laws and focus on criminal law". Third, the annotations and commentaries on legal provisions constitute the local resources of modern legal hermeneutics. The ancient Chinese people have exhausted their wisdom in interpreting legal principles, understanding the connotation, spirit, and purpose of legal texts. Their achievements are no less impressive than those of the "Corpus Juris Civilis" and the Italian School of Annotated Law in the 11th century. Professor He emphasized that if we can integrate Western achievements with the traditional Chinese legal commentary tradition, we will make more significant progress in the field of legal interpretation. Fourth, protecting the environment and natural resources is an excellent tradition of Chinese legal culture, and its deep-seated philosophy originates from the philosophical concept of "unity between man and nature". Currently, there is still room for improvement in China's nature reserves, biodiversity, ecological protection, and the implementation of supporting regulations. Professor He believes that in addition to learning from Western environmental protection experience, we should also pay attention to a series of environmental resource protection norms formed by the ancient people based on the idea of "unity between man and nature", and absorb and utilize them as local resources. Fifth, respecting the elderly and caring for the young, and showing sympathy for the disabled and the sick are legal expressions of human relations thought. Ancient Chinese law takes maintaining the human relations order of patriarchal society as the legal basis, viewing it as the fundamental path to self-cultivation, family regulation, and state governance, reflecting the legal construction of human relations norms. Sixth, the pursuit of the value of "no litigation" is conducive to building a harmonious socialist society. The tradition of non-litigation reflects the ancient people's yearning for a harmonious natural order and aligns with the universal desire for a stable life. It embodies its most essential value and meets the fundamental needs of humanity.