On the Proportional Reduction of Collective Legal Interests to Individual Legal Interests
Facing China's unidirectional preventive criminal legislation over the past three decades,how to deal with the relationship between collective and individual legal interests is a watershed for different views of criminal law.The doctrine of the independence of collective legal interests,which holds that collective legal interests cannot and need not be reduced to in-dividual legal interests,proposes the restriction of legal interests and the restriction of constitu-ent elements,but it is difficult for either of these two measures to limit the scope of criminal penalties.It is difficult to limit the application of constituent elements without guidance from le-gal interests.Therefore,it is necessary to move from the doctrine of independence of collective legal interests to the doctrine of reduction of collective legal interests and to externally and inter-nally identify the latter.External identification aims to clarify the relationship between the doc-trine of reduction and independence of collective legal interests,and internal identification aims to clarify the relationship between different paths within the doctrine of reduction.The reduction of collective legal interests is not a decomposition reduction because legal interests that can be decomposed into individual legal interests are not originally collective legal interests;it is not an interest reduction because legal interests are the highest common denominator of interests;and it is not a condition reduction because conditions are infinitely retrospective vertically and infi-nitely extensible horizontally.The essence of the reduction is a value-based reduction,namely the reduction of collective legal interests to a universal means of protecting individual legal in-terests.The means-end relationship between collective and individual legal interests determines that the protection of collective legal interests by criminal law should be limited by the principle of proportionality,which includes the purpose-justification test and the means-justification test.As far as the purpose-justification test is concerned,firstly,if a collective legal interest is not a universal means of protecting individual legal interests but a special means of protecting particu-lar interests,its protection is not justified by purpose;and secondly,aggregates of individual legal interests are not authentic collective legal interests,and the use of cumulative crimes to protect them does not serve a legitimate purpose.As far as means-justification test is con-cerned,firstly,it is disproportionate to protect collective legal interests if the protection does not promote individual legal interests but rather harms them;secondly,if criminal law already provides comprehensive protection for individual legal interests,it would be disproportionate to protect relevant collective legal interests;and thirdly,the protection of collective legal interests would be disproportionate if the means-end relationship no longer exists as a result of changes of times.
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