清代成案的法源效力,在法律文本中是以刚性否定为前提的,尽管其中也作出了弹性而模糊的例外规定。正是这个前提,左右了人们对成案的一般态度。但是,由于律例条文的刚性和“法条有限、情伪无穷”的必然性,在司法实践中,成案又不得不作为律例之外的下位法源而适用。在司法裁判中,成案能否适用以及如何适用,取决于约定俗成的习惯性规则,它们是时人法律思维与司法经验的反映,值得我们去反溯性还原。因为,这不仅有助于更好地认知传统司法的经验,也是对当下问题的一种历史性回应。

The effect of the legal source of judicial precedents in the Qing Dynasty took rigid negation as the prerequisite in legal texts, although there were flexible and vague exceptional stipulations.It was this prerequisite that determined people’s general attitude towards judicial precedents. However, judicial precedents were inevitably applicable as the low legal source apart from the statutes in judicial practice, due to the rigidity of the statutes and the necessity of “the limitation of legal provisions and the infinite factsof legal cases (法条有限、情伪无穷)”. Whether judicial precedentswere applicable and how they could be applied in judicial practice, depended on the established customary rules, which were the reflection of the legal thinking and judicial experience of the people at that time. And this is worthy of our retrospective restoration. This kind of reflective thinking can not only be helpful for people to have a better understanding of their traditional judicial experience, but also be their historical response to the current problems.