From the Back Cover
This book builds on the success of the First International Conference on Facts and Evidence: A Dialogue between Law and Philosophy (Shanghai, China, May 2016), which was co-hosted by the Collaborative Innovation Center of Judicial Civilization (CICJC) and East China Normal University. The Second International Conference on Facts and Evidence: A Dialogue between Law and History was jointly organized by the CICJC, the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science (ELFS) at China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), and Peking University School of Transnational Law (STL) in Shenzhen, China, on November 16-17, 2019.
Historians, legal scholars and legal practitioners share the same interest in ascertaining the "truth" in their respective professional endeavors. It is generally recognized that any historical study without truthful narration of historical events is fiction and that any judicial trial without accurate fact-finding is a miscarriage of justice. In both historical research and the judicial process, practitioners are invariably called upon, before making any arguments, to prove the underlying facts using evidence, regardless of how the concept is defined or employed in different academic or practical contexts. Thus, historians and legal professionals have respectively developed theories and methodological tools to inform and explain the process of gathering evidentiary proof. When lawyers and judges reconsider the facts of cases, "questions of law" are actually a subset of "questions of fact," and thus, the legal interpretation process also involves questions of "historical fact."
The book brings together more than twenty leading history and legal scholars from around the world to explore a range of issues concerning the role of facts as evidence in both disciplines. As such, the book is of enduring value to historians, legal scholars and everyone interested in truth-seeking.
Baosheng Zhang is an Duansheng Chair Professor at China University of Political Science and Law. Prof. Zhang also serves as the Director of Key Laboratory of Evidence Science of Ministry of Education of China, the Co-Chair of the "2011 Plan"--Cooperative Innovation Center of Judicial Civilization, and Vice President of International Association of Evidence Science. His research and teaching focus on Evidence Law, Procedure Law and Jurisprudence.
Thomas Yunlong Man is Professor from Practice at Peking University School of Transnational Law. Prof. Man's academic interests encompass Evidence Law, Comparative Judicial Process, Cross-Border Business Transactions and Legal History. In addition to various academic appointments with Peking University and Harvard-Yenching Institute of Harvard University, he has 17 years of law practice in cross-border M&A and corporate transactions with a number of leading international law firms in Chicago, Shanghai and Beijing.
Jing Lin is an Associate Professor of law at China University of Political Science and Law ("CUPL"). Before joined the CUPL, she had been working as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International law in Germany. Her research interests range from comparative criminal justice, comparative evidence rules, to corporate crime and its control. Her work entitled Compliance and Money Laundering Control by Banking Institutions in China has been published by the Press Duncker & Humblot in Germany.
