新英格兰殖民地刑事司法重点的转移

The Historical Shift of the Focus of Criminal Justice in the Puritan Colonies of New England

新英格兰地区刑事司法的重点从道德罪向财产罪的转移,曾被视为美国现代刑法观出现的重要标志之一,而且主要是发生在美国革命后的三十年里。不过,值得我们注意的是,这一转变其实早在清教殖民地建立不久即已开始,并随着殖民地社会在大众观念、经济发展、政治体制和宗教影响方面的变化而逐步加强,成为一种历史发展趋势。从新英格兰清教殖民地刑事司法重点的转移可以看出,美国刑法的现代化虽然起步很早,但进展缓慢,历时长久。事实上,直至19世纪结束,美国在经济增长和民主制度的发展上领先于欧洲的同时,却在刑事司法和国家机制的现代化上落后于许多欧洲国家。这一美国历史发展的重要特点,应该得到中国史学界更多的注意。

The shift of the focus of criminal justice from moral crimes to property crimes in New England during the thirty years after the American Revolution was regarded as one of the important developments to mark the emergence of the notions of modern criminal law in America.However,this development had actually started as early as in the first decades of the settlement of Puritans in New England and gathered increasingly strong momentum as a result of the changes in the popular mores,economic growth,political institutions,and religious establishments of these Puritan colonies.In other words,the shift had been underway for quite a long period and culminated in what historians saw as a milestone in the post-Revolutionary era.All this progress notwithstanding,there was still a long way to go in the early 19 th century to have modern criminal justice in America.Even at the end of the century,when leading the world in both industrialization and democratization,the United States lagged behind European countries nevertheless in the development of a modern system of criminal justice and state bureaucracy.This historical conundrum and its legacy deserve more study by Chinese historians.