Professor Li Buyun gives the first lecture in CASS Video Open Course Series “Masters Talks”

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Recently, the CASS Video Open Lecture Series “Masters Talks”, organized by China Social Sciences Press, was launched in Beijing. Under this project, a number of famous experts and scholars in the fields of humanities and social sciences are invited to share the results of their academic research and their values of life and to discuss various social problems from their respective academic perspectives. After the of the video lectures are recorded, they will be broadcasted to the public through QQLive and WeChat official account. The first lecture in the series, entitled “Ruing the country by law and safeguarding of human rights”, was given by Professor Li Buyun, a research fellow of CASS Law Institute and an honorary member of CASS. In the lecture, Professor Li first made a distinction between the “legal system” and “the rule of law”: the former is a system of the state relative to the economic, military, cultural, and social systems, whereas the latter is an idea and method of state governance. All states in history had a legal system, but a state with a legal system is not necessarily under the rule of law. For example, Hitler’s Germany had a legal system, but this did not mean that it was under the rule of law. Professor Li pointed out that ruling the country by law is an objective demand of the market economy, which is an economy under the rule of law. Meanwhile, it is also an important precondition of democratic politics as well as a main criterion of human civilization. Finally, ruling the country by law is the basic guarantee of lasting political stability. In the lecture, Professor Li also shared his own personal experience of carrying out research on ruling the country by law, which can be summarized as “seeking the truth and being innovative, rigorous and tolerant”. At the end of lecture, Professor Li, who is now 84 years old, said that he would continue his academic research and write four more books in the future.