The 2016 National Social Science Foundation Youth Project "Study on Matrimonial Property Law in the Context of Civil Code Codification (16CFX054)" undertaken by Professor He Jian of Law School was awarded an Outstanding Award. The final product of the project is "The Spirit of Matrimonial Property Law: With the Context of Civil Code Codification" (a collection of essays), which mainly discusses what kind of value judgment should be adhered to in the context of Chinese law and society, what kind of legal techniques should be used to realize this value judgment, and how these value judgment and legal techniques will shape the specific legal system. As the final product of the project, the book "The Spirit of Matrimonial Property Law" adheres to the principle of "the form is scattered, the spirit is not scattered", and aims to provide a coherent analytical framework to justify, explain or restructure almost all the rules of matrimonial property law. The book is divided into two parts, a total of ten chapters. Most of the chapters have been published previously, and four of the corresponding papers have been reprinted in the newspaper "Civil and Commercial Law"; some chapters, such as "The Basic Way of Returning Marriage Law to Civil Law" and "The Spirit of Matrimonial Property Law", have become or are becoming classic papers in the field of marriage law. Some papers put forward original viewpoints, for example, a community debt shall be interpreted as a limited joint and several debt which is limited to "all community property + personal property of the couple in debt" and that the statutory property system, in principle, only has effect on creditor's rights rather than on real rights. These viewpoints have been increasingly accepted in academic circles and practice circles. 

Translated by: Yang Han

Edited by: Li Tianmei