This chapter has two parts. The first part investigates how the Party controls courts. It finds that the Party maximizes its political control over judicial affairs by normalizing its political prerogative in judicial decision-making. The normalization process takes two steps. First, all judges within a court are embedded in a chain of command—from Party leaders to court leaders, divisional heads, and frontline judges—tasked with processing and translating political directives into partial judicial outcomes that serve Party-state interests when needed. The legality of these demands or their immunity from legal scrutiny is derived from the Party’s political prerogative. This practice is then replicated across all courts and among all judges nationwide. The second part of this chapter analyzes reported cases of judicial corruption to identify what has caused the spread of judicial corruption. It concludes that the root cause is the very normalization of the Party’s political prerogative. Because this prerogative is inherently arbitrary and vulnerable to abuse, its institutionalization creates systemic opportunities for corruption across the political-legal apparatus. As a result, what begins as political control ultimately facilitates the pervasive spread of judicial corruption.