4 - High-End Demand for Legal Services and Local Pressure to Professionalize the Judiciary

Summary

The strategic judicial responses to the Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS), detailed in the previous chapter, provide necessary context for understanding how the stratification of local markets for legal services in urban China can affect court reform and the decisional autonomy of judges. Variation in the development of the legal profession in different urban localities is the focus of this chapter, which also traces the major spatial and temporal shifts that have influenced lawyers’ career choices, and in turn, judicial designs in urban China. A spatially informed explanation of socio-legal processes and their structural effects begins with the higher salaries, standards, and status available to lawyers in “high-end” local legal service markets; the temporal analysis concentrates on how these dynamics were made possible by national recommitments to liberalizing reforms in the late twentieth century and then accelerated in the early twenty-first century.