Hostname: page-component-5b777bbd6c-gtgcz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-06-23T22:03:20.682Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions

How to Use Text as Data in the Field of Chinese Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2022

Benjamin L. Liebman ,
Margaret E. Roberts ,
Rachel E. Stern  and
Alice Z. Wang
Benjamin L. Liebman*
Affiliation:
Columbia Law School
Margaret E. Roberts
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
Rachel E. Stern
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Alice Z. Wang
Affiliation:
Columbia Law School
*
Contact the corresponding author, Benjamin L. Liebman, at BL2075@columbia.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outline strategies for learning from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits are often an attempt to enlist help from the state in resolving an underlying civil dispute.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Law and Courts , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , Fall 2020 , pp. 177 - 201
Copyright
© 2020 by the Law and Courts Organized Section of the American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

We are grateful to a large number of commentators in both China and the United States whose feedback helped improve this article and to the many research assistants at Berkeley, Columbia, and the University of California, San Diego, who worked on various stages of this project. Particular thanks to Kevin Coakley, Subhasis Dasgupta, Amarnath Gupta, Haoshen Hong, and Kai Lin at the San Diego Supercomputer and Xiaohan Wu at Columbia Law for their help with the data. This work was partially funded by the National Science Foundation RIDIR program, award 1738411.

References

Brandeis, Louis D. 1913. “What Publicity Can Do.” Harper’s Weekly, December 20, 10–13.Google Scholar
Bryan, Amanda C., and Ringsmuth, Eve M. 2016. “Jeremiad or Weapon of Words? The Power of Emotive Language in Supreme Court Dissents.” Journal of Law and Courts 4 (1): 159–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cai, Lidong, and Liu, Siming. 2016. 社会团体法人自治与司法审查的实证研究 [An empirical study on the autonomy of social enterprise legal persons and judicial review]. Faxue Zazhi 法学杂志 12:15–22.Google Scholar
Cui, Wei. 2017. “Does Judicial Independence Matter? A Study of the Determinants of Administrative Litigation in an Authoritarian Regime.” University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law 38:941–98.Google Scholar
Denny, Matthew J., and Spirling, Arthur. 2018. “Text Preprocessing for Unsupervised Learning: Why It Matters, When It Misleads, and What to Do about It.” Political Analysis 26 (2): 168–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, Michael, McIntosh, Wayne, Lin, Jimmy, and Cates, Cynthia. 2007. “Recounting the Courts? Applying Automated Content Analysis to Enhance Empirical Legal Research.” Journal of Empirical Legal Research 4 (4): 1007–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finder, Susan. 1989. “Like Throwing an Egg against a Stone? Administrative Litigation in the People’s Republic of China.” Journal of Chinese Law 3:1–10.Google Scholar
Funk, Kellen, and Mullen, Lincoln A. 2018. “The Spine of American Law: Digital Text Analysis and U.S. Legal Practice.” American Historical Review 123 (1): 132–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grendstad, Gunnar, Shaffer, William R., and Waltenburg, Eric N. 2017. “Norway: Managed Openness and Transparency.” In Justices and Journalists: The Global Perspective, ed. Davies, Richard and Taras, David, 235–54. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, Roberts, Margaret E., and Stewart, Brandon. 2019. “Text as Data: How to Make Large Scale Inferences from Language.” Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
Grimmer, Justin, and Stewart, Brandon M. 2013. “Text as Data: The Promise and Pitfalls of Automatic Content Analysis Methods for Political Texts.” Political Analysis 21 (3): 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
He, Haibo. 2018. “How Much Progress Can Legislation Bring: The 2014 Amendment of the Administrative Litigation Law of PRC.” University of Pennsylvania Asian Law Review 13:137–90.Google Scholar
He, Weifang. 2003. 建设透明法院 [Creating transparent courts]. Southern Weekend, April 2. https://perma.cc/ZD5Z-HXL7.Google Scholar
Henan High People’s Court. 2015. 河南省高级人民法院工作报告解读河南省第十二届人民代表大会第四次会议 [Interpreting the fourth meeting of the twelfth people’s congress of Henan Province—the Henan Province High People’s Court work report]. https://perma.cc/KNK4-KSQQ.Google Scholar
Hollyer, James R., Peter Rosendorff, B., and Raymond Vreeland, James. 2015. “Transparency, Protest, and Autocratic Instability.” American Political Science Review 109 (4): 764–84.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ingram, Mathew C. 2017. “Uncommon Transparency: The Supreme Court, Media Relations, and Public Opinion in Brazil.” In Justices and Journalists: The Global Perspective, ed. Davies, Richard and Taras, David, 58–80. New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jie, Zhu. 2016. 周强: 加快智慧法院建设促进司法为民公正司法 [Zhou Qiang: Speed up the creation of “smart courts” to promote justice for the people and fair justice]. Supreme People’s Court. https://perma.cc/6M9T-7QE4.Google Scholar
Klingenstein, Sara, Hitchcock, Tim, and DeDeo, Simon. 2014. “The Civilizing Process in London’s Old Bailey.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 111 (26): 9419–24.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Law, David S. 2016. “Constitutional Archetypes.” Texas Law Review 95:153–243.Google Scholar
Law, David S. 2019. “Constitutional Dialects and Transnational Legal Orders.” In Constitution-Making and Transnational Legal Order, ed. Shafer, Gregory, Ginsburg, Tom, and Halliday, Terence C., 110–55. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Moontae, and Mimno, David. 2014. “Low-Dimensional Embeddings for Interpretable Anchor-Based Topic Inference.” In Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 1319–28. Red Hook, NY: Curran.Google Scholar
Li, Ji. 2013. “Suing the Leviathan—an Empirical Analysis of the Changing Role of Administrative Litigation in China.” Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 10 (4): 815–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Ji. 2014. “Dare You Sue the Tax Collector? An Empirical Study of Administrative Lawsuits against Tax Agencies in China.” Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal 23 (1): 57–112.Google Scholar
Liebman, Benjamin L. 2011. “The Media and the Courts: Towards Competitive Supervision?” China Quarterly 208:833–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Liebman, Benjamin L. 2015. “Leniency in Chinese Criminal Law? Everyday Justice in Henan.” Berkeley Journal of International Law 33 (1): 153–222.Google Scholar
Liebman, Benjamin, and Wu, Tim. 2007. “China’s Network Justice.” Chicago Journal of International Law 8:257–321.Google Scholar
Livermore, Michael A., Riddell, Allen B., and Rockmore, Daniel N. 2017. “The Supreme Court and the Judicial Genre.” Arizona Law Review 59:837–902.Google Scholar
Lorentzen, Peter, Landry, Pierre, and Yasuda, John. 2014. “Undermining Authoritarian Innovation: The Power of China’s Industrial Giants.” Journal of Politics 76 (1): 182–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lucas, Christopher, Nielsen, Richard A., Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., Storer, Alex, and Tingley, Dustin. 2015. “Computer-Assisted Text Analysis for Comparative Politics.” Political Analysis 23 (2): 254–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ma, Chao, Yu, Xiaohong, and He, Haibo. 2016. 大数据分析: 中国司法裁判文书上网公开报告 [Empirical analysis of China’s online court decision database]. China Law Review 中国法律评 4:195–246. https://perma.cc/6T5V-KNXH.Google Scholar
Mahboubi, Neysun. 2014. “Suing the Government in China.” In Democratization in China, Korea and Southeast Asia? Local and National Perspectives, ed. Xiao Zhou, Kate, Rigger, Shelley, and White, Lynn T. III, 141–55. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Malesky, Edmund, Schuler, Paul, and Tran, Anh. 2012. “The Adverse Effects of Sunshine: A Field Experiment on Legislative Transparency in an Authoritarian Assembly.” American Political Science Review 106 (4): 762–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Ian Matthew. 2013. “Rebellion, Crime and Violence in Qing China, 1722–1911: A Topic Modeling Approach.” Poetics 41 (6): 626–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National People’s Congress Standing Committee. 2012. 中华人民共和国民事诉讼法 [Civil Procedure Law of the People’s Republic of China]. https://perma.cc/MBX4-V2XX.Google Scholar
Nguyen, Trang Mae. 2019. “In Search of Judicial Legitimacy: Criminal Sentencing in Vietnamese Courts.” Harvard Human Rights Journal 32 (1): 147–88.Google Scholar
Patton, Dana, and Smith, Joseph L. 2017. “Lawyer, Interrupted: Gender Bias in Oral Arguments at the US Supreme Court.” Journal of Law and Courts 5 (2): 337–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rice, Douglas R. 2017. “Issue Divisions and US Supreme Court Decision Making.” Journal of Politics 79 (1): 210–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., and Airoldi, Edoardo M. 2016. “A Model of Text for Experimentation in the Social Sciences.” Journal of the American Statistical Association 111 (515): 988–1003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, Margaret E., Stewart, Brandon M., and Tingley, Dustin. 2019. “STM: R Package for Structural Topic Models.” Journal of Statistical Software 91 (2): 1–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sina Court Channel. 2016. 中国裁判文书网：全球最大文书公开平台10月1日起施行 [China court judgments: World’s largest online judgments platform to come into effect October 1]. https://perma.cc/9KQQ-HQB4.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2009a. 人民法院第三个五年改革纲要 [Third 5-year reform outline for the people’s courts]. February 24. https://perma.cc/U9V9-5PQ5.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2009b. 最高人民法院印发 “关于司法公开的六项规定” 和 “关于人民法院接受新闻媒体舆论监督的若干规定” 的通知 [Supreme People’s Court’s notice on the “publication of six measures on judicial openness” and “certain provisions on People’s Court accepting news media supervision”]. December 8. https://perma.cc/TT2U-J4WB.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2010. “关于人民法院在互联网公布裁判文书的规定” 和 “关于人民法院直播录播庭审活动的规定” 的通知 [Notice of the Supreme People’s Court on the issuance of judicial documents on the internet by the people’s courts and the provisions on the live broadcasting and rebroadcasting of court trials by the people’s courts]. November 21.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2013. 最高人民法院关于人民法院在互联网公布裁判文书的规定 [Provisions of the Supreme People’s Court on the issuance of judgments on the internet by the people’s courts]. https://perma.cc/3A2L-QSVF.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2016a. 最高人民法院关于人民法院在互联网公布裁判文书的规定 [Supreme People’s Court regulations regarding placing judicial decisions on the internet]. https://perma.cc/NG8N-BCJ6.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2016b. 最高人民法院关于印发 “人民法院民事裁判文书制作规范” “民事诉讼文书样式” 的通知 [Notice of specifications for civil decisions by the people’s courts on the issuance of “standards for judicial decision” and “the style of civil litigation documents”]. https://perma.cc/LYC6-ZUWW.Google Scholar
SPC (Supreme People’s Court). 2017. “Judicial Transparency by People’s Courts.” March 14. https://perma.cc/MN9U-5K6L.Google Scholar
Staton, Jeffrey K. 2010. Judicial Power and Strategic Communication in Mexico. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stern, Rachel E. 2014. “The Political Logic of China’s New Environmental Courts.” China Journal 72:53–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tiffert, Glenn D. 2019. “Peering Down the Memory Hole: Censorship, Digitization, and the Fragility of Our Knowledge Base.” American Historical Review 124 (2): 550–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, Hongyao, and Zhang, Liang. 2017. 死刑复核程序中被告人的律师帮助权—基于255份死刑复核刑事裁定书的实证研究 [Defendants’ right to assistance from an attorney in the death penalty review process: An empirical study based on 255 criminal verdicts of death penalty review]. Falü Shiyong 法律适用 7:61–69.Google Scholar
You, Wei. 2013. 用制度排除权力干预维护司法权威 [Use systems to prevent political intervention and safeguard judicial authority]. Legal Daily. https://perma.cc/KBX2-QHDJ.Google Scholar
Zhang, Taisu, and Ginsburg, Tom. 2019. “China’s Turn toward Law.” Virginia Journal of International Law 59:278–361.Google Scholar
Zhang, Xuehua, Ortolano, Leonard, and Lu, Zhongmei. 2010. “Agency Empowerment through the Administrative Litigation Law: Court Enforcement of Pollution Levies in Hubei Province.” China Quarterly 202:307–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhao, Ruigang, and Geng, Xieyang. 2016. 指导性案例 “适用难” 的实证研究—以261份裁判文书为分析样本 [An empirical study on the “difficulties in applying” guiding cases: Taking 261 judgments as a sample for analysis]. Faxue Zazhi 法学杂志 3:115–23.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Liebman et al. supplementary material
Download undefined(File)
File 912.4 KB