2 - An Ecological Theory of Court Reform in Urban China

Summary

At the outset of the post-Mao reform era in 1978, there was little semblance of an organized legal profession in China – certainly not in a formal sense. The globally unprecedented growth of the legal profession in the subsequent decades, however, led to significant changes in China’s courts and its broader legal system, and this chapter begins telling the story of how these changes occurred. What began as a state-led efforts to construct a professional class of lawyers largely began in the early 1980s transformed into a privatized expansion effort closely related to inbound foreign investment into China. In the early twenty-first century, the growth of the legal profession pressuring courts to recalibrate various institutional practices related to judicial autonomy, particularly in urban areas, in order to stem the attrition of judges leaving courts for law firm employment opportunities.