The study of legal culture has been carried out in China for decades and has made important academic contributions to promoting the development of law. At present, as we accelerate the construction of a socialist cultural power, the study of legal culture has ushered in new opportunities for development. This magazine invites three scholars to write articles from different perspectives, reviewing the development process of legal culture research, reflecting on existing problems and shortcomings, and exploring specific focus areas for high-quality legal culture research at present, in order to promote the revitalization of academic vitality in legal culture research and help construct China's independent legal knowledge system. If we count from the first appearance of "legal culture" as a specialized knowledge point in legal theory textbooks in 1985, the specialized research on legal culture has been carried out in China's legal field for 40 years. The academic achievements under the banner of "legal culture" can be considered quite remarkable in terms of quantity. However, around 2006, some scholars calmly pointed out that although research under the name of "legal culture" continued to increase, overall it showed a fatigue in academic innovation. This reminds us that the study of legal culture in China's legal field has not always flourished, but has encountered some bottlenecks after many years of development. To find effective solutions to overcome the above difficulties, it is advisable to start with problem-based reflection from the perspective of academic history. As early as the Republican era, some scholars sporadically used the term "legal culture" due to the trend of He Wei. In the 1950s, some scholars also used expressions such as "legal cultural heritage" and "legal culture" when discussing the issue of "inheritance of law". However, the concept of "legal culture" received increasing attention and widespread use from legal researchers after the mid-1980s. In 1985, Professor Sun Guohua of the Law Department of Renmin University of China set up a whole section entitled "Legal Culture" for the first time in many textbooks of jurisprudence for the whole country, such as Basic Theory of Law and Lectures on Basic Theory of Law, which symbolized that "legal culture" has officially entered the knowledge system of Chinese legal theory. Shortly thereafter, discussions on "legal culture" became a new academic trend in China's legal community. Many legal researchers have conducted research on the definition, structure, scope, hierarchy, characteristics, classification, functions, development laws, and many other aspects of legal culture. Some scholars have even proposed the idea of establishing "legal culture studies" and its branches. When reviewing this academic history, many scholars emphasize that the initial rise of legal culture research in China's legal community was an extension of the "cultural fever" in the field of law in the 1980s. This argument takes into account the influence of specific historical backgrounds on legal research, but if we only explain the above academic phenomena in a general way based on the impact of this external factor, we will miss out on thinking about many internal issues that deserve further attention. From the perspective of the development of the discipline of law itself, the most fundamental factor that promoted the study of legal culture in China's legal community in the mid to late 1980s was the consensus on the goal of "modernization" at that time. Based on reflection on the historical experience and lessons learned before, more and more legal researchers realized the crucial importance of cultural soil issues in China's legal system construction. The sudden rise of legal culture research is the result of China's legal community's deepening understanding of the complex relationship between legal systems and legal concepts. It is believed that the true realization of modernization of the legal system cannot be achieved solely by the legal system in the sense of legislative texts. It is also necessary to reform the old legal concepts that potentially constrain the construction of modern legal systems, so that the people's inner consciousness can be maximally aligned with the modern values pursued by legal construction. One of the main reasons why the popularity of legal culture research declined in the mid to late 1980s, and after just over a decade, it has lost its initial grandeur is that the concept of "legal culture" has long lacked a clear definition with universal consensus. From the period of the Republic of China to before 1985, although some Chinese scholars have used the term "legal culture", there has been almost no clear definition of the connotation of this concept. Since 1985, some legal researchers in China have attempted to explain the connotation of the concept of "legal culture": some scholars have placed the key points of understanding the connotation of the concept of "legal culture" at the level of spiritual civilization such as attitude, belief, and value; Many scholars also tend to give a broad interpretation of "legal culture", treating it as a concept that encompasses both institutional and conceptual dimensions, and even includes the dimension of objects. As a result, the content referred to by this academic term in their writings is almost equivalent to all legal phenomena. The lack of basic consensus on the prerequisite issue of defining the concept of "legal culture" has greatly affected the further development of legal culture research, to the extent that some scholars lamented in the 1990s that the concept of "legal culture" had already been abused and vulgarized when it first became popular in China's legal community. In addition to the long-standing differences in understanding the concept and connotation of "legal culture", another major reason for the lack of follow-up in legal culture research lies in the research methodology. For example, a legal historian in the late 1980s talked about legal culture as a method from a certain perspective, emphasizing that the study of legal culture is the use of comprehensive and systematic methods to describe the macro system of human legal practice activities. This viewpoint can certainly help overcome the narrow academic perspective caused by excessive emphasis on categorization, but there is also a risk of academic confusion and the inability to provide practical research methods and specific guidance. Therefore, such academic approaches naturally cannot truly promote the leap and transformation from legal culture research as a noun label to legal culture research as an academic method. In the study of legal culture in the 1980s and 1990s, the academic slogan of legal historian Liang Zhiping, "Use law to explain culture, use culture to explain law," was impressive. His books such as "Legal Debate," "Seeking Harmony in Natural Order," and "Cultural Interpretation of Law," are widely recognized as forming his own unique method of legal culture research. However, if we further divide the specific methods of legal culture research that he mainly adopted at different stages of this period into the "comparative typology of legal culture" research method and the "cultural interpretation of law" research method, we can find that both have inherent problems that restrict their ability to be promoted and developed in the present. Specifically, the newly emerged "comparative typology of legal culture" research at that time was influenced by the "cultural fever" trend in the 1980s, which focused on criticizing traditional Chinese culture. It often used Western legal culture types and their characteristics as criteria to criticize China's inherent legal culture as another type. With the review and reflection of Western centrism in China's legal community, especially the awakening and emphasis on cultural subjectivity, more and more researchers realize the need to abandon this research method. Liang Zhiping himself later reflected on this matter. The study of "cultural interpretation of law" emphasizes the exploration and questioning of the deep "basis" and "meaning" behind the establishment and process of law, thus possessing profound speculative significance and demonstrating a "sympathetic understanding" of Chinese legal tradition. However, this type of research requires researchers who adhere to this academic approach to have rich knowledge accumulation outside of many legal disciplines such as anthropology, linguistics, philosophical hermeneutics, etc. In addition, they deliberately limit their application mainly to the field of legal history and do not deal with specific practical problems. Therefore, in the increasingly practice oriented legal community in China, although this research method has distinct academic characteristics, it is not easy to win many peers to imitate it. How to seek breakthroughs in the current era where cultural issues are highly valued, especially with the mission of "inheriting excellent traditional Chinese legal culture" becoming our common face, legal culture research has also ushered in new academic development opportunities. How to promote the breakthrough development of legal culture research is an important academic issue that requires legal researchers to jointly consider. Based on the above, since the two main problems that led to the previous dilemma of legal culture research were conceptual definition and research methods, it is worth focusing on these two aspects to explore how to promote the academic vitality of legal culture research in the present. On the one hand, seeking to gather a basic consensus on the definition of the connotation of the concept of "legal culture" to avoid it becoming a decorative label that is arbitrarily generalized and used. In this regard, the key points of understanding should be clearly positioned in the dimension of concepts, which helps to define legal culture as a research field with a clear and distinct core. For example, when we think about how to promote the creative transformation and innovative development of China's excellent traditional legal culture, we can focus our specific thinking on the ancient and modern inheritance of concepts, values, thoughts, and ideas such as "putting etiquette into punishment, promoting etiquette and emphasizing law", "the people are the foundation of the country, and the foundation is stable and peaceful", "there is no litigation in the world, and peace is the most precious", "virtue is the main complement to punishment, and virtue is cautious in punishment", "assisting the law to determine crimes, and punishing them accordingly". On the other hand, it is important to draw academic resources from multiple related disciplines and explore and update research methods on legal culture. From the perspective of academic history review, when the study of legal culture flourished in China's legal field in the mid to late 1980s, legal historians played a very important role as academic pioneers. In addition, there were two equally important academic driving forces at that time, namely, legal scholars engaged in the basic theoretical research of legal culture, and legal sociologists who focused on the practical construction of the legal system in reality. In other words, the study of legal culture in China benefited from multiple sources of knowledge and various research approaches at the beginning of its rise in the legal field. Therefore, in order to promote the deepening of legal culture research, it is necessary to fully draw intellectual resources from the relevant branches of disciplines mentioned above, form a broad research perspective and integrated research methods, strengthen the ability to pay attention to and respond to real problems, and serve the construction of China's independent legal knowledge system. (New Society)