Week 11

• Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin K. Liebman, Margaret E. Roberts, and Alice Z. Wang, “Automating Fairness? Artificial Intelligence in the Chinese Courts,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 59, 2021, pp.514-553
• Sida Liu and Terence Halliday, “Survival Strategies and Political Values,” Chapter 4, Criminal Defense in China, 2015

2014 to make court decisions publicly available (522)

2017 to video record all trials and to live stream public hearings (523)

2018 to make public annual court work report (524)

Zhou Qiang’s initiative of creating “smart courts” to improve the courts’ ability to monitor society and defuse social conflict, to improve oversight of judges and reduce malfeasance, and to move toward a world in which judges rely on algorithms to boost efficiency and consistency.

two key constituencies inside the judiciary—provincial court leaders (convenience to supervise the daily activities of courts and judges) and frontline judges (lighter workload and decreased responsibility for decision-making)—see how different applications of technology could make their jobs easier and lives better.

Scholarly analysis of existent data must “investigate missing data before assuming that even a gigantic corpus of legal documents is complete.”

The primary goal of Project 206 (launched on Feb 6 2017, collaboration between the Shanghai courts and iFlyTek) is “to standardize and streamline evidence collection, to improve consistency in the treatment of similar cases, and to strengthen oversight of judges to reduce erroneously-decided cases” (541).

“Political Embeddedness” (Michelson): “lawyers’ formal or informal ties to the state through their career histories and social networks”

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