While many scholars have expressed an interest in the legal system and its development in the early PRC, most have provided only fleeting and tangential coverage of the period between the Legal Reform Movement (1952-1953) and the Anti-Rightist Movement (1957). For example, Chen Shouyi simply mentions the achievements of the 1954 constitution and the revival of jurisprudence around 1956. Other scholars have mostly centered their research on the political campaigns, abuses of law, and labor camps in this period, and they do not heed the Party's shift of policy toward lenience and legal professionalism in 1956 and 1957. There are some scholars who tend to regard the legal developments between 1953 and 1957 as consistent and smooth without treating the dynamic policy changes during and after the 1955 anti-counterrevolutionary movement. But they hail the period 1953-1957 as a “Golden Age” during which the Chinese legal system was arguably at its best before 1976.

Hou Songtao wrote in 2008 that the three to four years after the 1952 legal reform were a “Golden Age” in legal construction, which had previously been mainly “propelled” by the “needs” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to consolidate its political power and social reform.