| In the past, due to the lack of historical materials, the academic world knew very little about the legal order of the regional states outside the capital area in West Zhou Dynasty. Recently, some bronze inscriptions excavated in the provinces of Shandong, Shanxi and Hubei have been published, providing researchers with clues to the relevant issues. During the Zhou Conquest, Zhou people did not comprehensively transplant their legal institutions into the colonized lands. On the contrary, the royal court was in favor of maintaining the status quo and permitted self-determination by the people in these lands. The court even made initiatives to learn about the institutions of indigenous tribes. Correspondingly, dynastic judicial force played an active part in the establishment of legal order in regional states. When the internal order in a regional state collapsed or was disrupted, the Zhou King or the ruling chancellor serving as the agent of the king would act as a judge and use adjudicative power to restore the internal order in that state. When using legal means to rule the regional states of alien races, the royal court concentrated on "judicial method" rather than "legislative method". It acted as a judge to establish the authority of Zhou instead of forcing its own legal institutions on alien races. This was the basic feature of the establishment of legal order in the Western Zhou regional states. |
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