 The term “Legalist school” (fa jia 法家) is ubiquitous in studies of early Chinese political philosophy. Despite manifold criticisms of its inaccuracy (e.g., Goldin 2011), the term may still be usefully employed, as long as two major points are taken into account. First, Legalists were not a self-aware and organized intellectual current; rather the name was coined as a post-factum categorization of certain thinkers and texts, and its primary function before the twentieth century was that of a bibliographical category in imperial libraries. Therefore, the identification of any thinker or text as “Legalist” will forever remain arbitrary; the term may be used as a heuristic convention but should not be employed (pace Creel 1974) as an analytical device. Second, “Legalism” is a problematic name. The Chinese term fa jia is already misleading, because it inadvertently reduces the rich intellectual content of this current to a single keyword, fa. “Legalism” is a doubly misleading English translation, because the semantic field of the term fa 法 is much broader than “law”; it refers also to methods, standards, impersonal regulations and the like (Creel 1974: 147–149; Goldin 2011). It is incongruent, then, to discuss the fa jia within the context of the Occidental notion of “the rule of law,” as was popular in early modern Chinese scholarship (e.g., Hsiao 1979: 442–446) and as is sometimes done even nowadays (Fu Zhengyuan 1996: 158–161). If these intrinsic inaccuracies of the term “Legalism” are borne in mind, it can be employed—as in what follows—merely for heuristic convenience. The term is simply so widespread in scholarly literature that replacing it with a new designation will just further confuse the readers.