MODERN state-building is more than designing a national flag, choosing a national anthem, and designating a capital city. Establishing a legal system and building legislative and judicial institutions are some of the essential innovations that modern state-building requires. In the 1950s, the Chinese Communists were no strangers to this thinking. After all, constitutionalism had already been debated and experimented with in China for decades. The state of the Nationalists before 1949 had established an elaborate and sophisticated legal system. The Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had also installed a constitutional and legal system. Furthermore, laws and regulations seemed to have a magic appeal to many sectors of the society that the CCP's ideology and organization did not have. Yet, by definition, revolution and law must be the two most incompatible ideas in human conceptualization. Hence, how the CCP as a revolutionary organization dealt with a legal system of its own is our main focus. This chapter begins with the CCP's initial efforts at establishing a new legal system in the early 1950s. It analyzes how the legal development challenged the power and privileges of the CCP and how a major crisis led to a fundamental reversal in the late 1950s.