Hierarchical Restriction and Reduction of Overcriminalization of Teachers' Disciplinary Behaviors

TONG Yunfeng

Abstract: The right to education is an important part of basic human rights. To transform from a designed vision to a reality in practice, teachers' right to discipline, as a component of the right to education, needs tangible support from the criminal law. The criminal law cannot be absent from promoting the rule of law in education. However, in practice, teachers' disciplinary behaviors are often excessively criminalized, leading to problems such as over-expanding punishment and harming the innocent and even the malaise that endanger substantive justice such as the tarnishing of teachers' disciplinary right and the imbalance of teachers' disciplinary behaviors. Such overcriminalization has its social causes and normative crux, which is the ambiguity of regulations of teachers' disciplinary right in terms of the pre-existing law and the unclear positioning of the justification of teachers' disciplinary behaviors in terms of the criminal law. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out a dual clarification of the chaotic parts of the two laws and determine the corresponding guiding principles, and test them one by one through the hierarchical theory of crime to make the path of exculpation clear. At the level of constituent elements, the exculpation is achieved through the normative judgment of the constituent elements; At the level of illegality, the exculpation is achieved by virtue of substantive considerations of reasons such as legal acts, legitimate defense, and victims' commitments; At the level of accountability, the exculpation is achieved through the value screening of the culpability paradigm. We should reverse the trend of overcriminalization of teachers' disciplinary behaviors by clearing the way of exculpation.

Keywords: teachers' disciplinary behaviors · overcriminalization · hierarchical theory of crime · justifiable reason