Hierarchical Restriction and Reduction of Overcriminalization of Teachers’Disciplinary Behaviors

The right to education is an important part of basic human rights. To transform from a designed vision to a reality in practice, teachers’ right to discipline, as a component of the right to education, needs tangible support from the criminal law. The criminal law cannot be absent from promoting the rule of law in education. However, in practice, teachers’ disciplinary behaviors are often ex-cessively criminalized, leading to problems such as over-expanding punishment and harming the innocent and even the malaise that en-danger substantive justice such as the tarnishing of teachers’ disci-plinary right and the imbalance of teachers’ disciplinary behaviors. Such overcriminalization has its social causes and normative crux, which is the ambiguity of regulations of teachers’ disciplinary right in terms of the pre-existing law and the unclear positioning of the jus-tification of teachers’ disciplinary behaviors in terms of the criminal law. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a dual clarification of the chaotic parts of the two laws and determine the corresponding guiding principles, and test them one by one through the hierarchical theory of crime to make the path of exculpation clear. At the level of constituent elements, the exculpation is achieved through the normative judgment of the constituent elements;At the level of illegality, the exculpation is achieved by virtue of substantive considerations of reasons such as le-gal acts, legitimate defense, and victims’ commitments;At the level of accountability, the exculpation is achieved through the value screening of the culpability paradigm. We should reverse the trend of overcrim-inalization of teachers’ disciplinary behaviors by clearing the way of exculpation.

Problems with the theory of anti-value acts： including a discussion with professor Zhou Guangquan

The debate between the theory of anti-value acts （Handlungsunwert） and the theory of anti-value consequences （Erfolgsunwert） is of great significance. The main defects of the former are that it focuses on crime as a violation of norms, which runs counter to criminal law＇s aim of protecting legal interests; it highlights criminal law＇s function in regulating behavior, thus deviating from the essential principle of a legally prescribed punishment for a specified crime; and it gives wide acceptance to subjective elements of illegality, leading to a holistic determination of crime, thus confusing illegality with responsibility. It also blurs the distinction between attempted and unrealized offenses, and is not conducive to the application of the theory of the subordination of accomplices. Its focus on subjective legitimized elements not only fails to restrict the application of punishments, but actually expands their scope, and its adoption of rule utilitarianism leads to undue interference in citizens＇ conduct. The theory of anti-value consequences prevents undue interference and adopts the principle of liberalism, while at the same time taking as the target of its prohibitions those situations that contravene the aims of criminal law. This not only overcomes the shortcomings of the theory of anti-value conduct but also achieves general and special prevention while realizing retributive justice.