Taisu Zhang

This paper examines the institutional motivations that underlie several major developments in the Supreme People’s Court of China’s recent policy-making. Since 2007, the Court has sent off a collection of policy signals that escapes sweeping ideological labeling: It has publicly embraced a populist view of legal reform, encouraging the use of mediation in dispute resolution and popular participation in judicial policy-making, but continues to advocate legal professionalization as a long-term policy objective. It has also eagerly attempted to enhance its own institutional competence by promoting judicial efficiency, simplifying key areas of civil law, and expanding its control over lower court adjudication. This paper argues that the strongest institutional motivation underlying this complex pattern of activity is, contrary to some common assumptions, neither simple obedience to the Party leadership nor internalized belief in some legal reform ideology, whether legal professionalism ...

This article surveys recent academic literature on the Supreme People’s Court of China, sorting existing studies into three basic categories: those that study what the Court is allowed to do, those that study what it actually does, and those that study why it does those things. Moving from the first category to the second and third is, in many ways, a progression from a predominantly formalist method to more realist ones. The article argues that the field suffers from a lack of rigorous political economy modeling and that this affects not only the thoroughness of studies in the third category, but also those in the first and second categories. Remedying these problems will depend on whether future scholarship can successfully make use of the theoretical and empirical tools developed by political science and institutional economics. Most importantly, the field needs to develop a usable model of individual judge behavior, based on their material incentives, political aspirations, and ...