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Current Projects Since the Center was launched, we have begun and steadily expanded collaborative projects with leading Chinese legal experts in three main areas: judicial reform, administrative law and regulatory reform, and legal education. By design, our projects emphasize legal institutions – the courts, administrative bureaucracies, and law schools. This suits the current state of Chinese legal reform, which in recent years has come to focus on the shortcomings of China's legal institutions and the need to rethink their roles and relationships. It is also our premise that improvements in institutions can have beneficial effects cutting across many different fields of substantive law. I. Judicial Reform: The first priority area for our Center is judicial reform, arguably the most pressing area of legal reform in China today. It is widely accepted in China that the courts must be reformed if they are to play their essential role as China develops a market economy, experiences a growing consciousness of legal rights, and requires fair, efficient, and predictable judicial institutions to settle disputes and review bureaucratic decisions. With more of their relationships and rights defined by law, Chinese are increasingly turning to the legal system to resolve their disputes. The Chinese courts today are handling ten times as many cases as 20 years ago. In many instances, they have not been up to the challenge. Poor training, inefficient procedures, lack of transparency, and reliance on local governments for personnel and funding have undermined the courts' ability to handle cases fairly and efficiently and provided fertile ground for corruption. In keeping with the centrality of judicial reform to legal reform, our Center has a number of projects underway in this area: 1. We are working with the Supreme People's Court and the National Judges College on comparative research related to (1) reforms in the structure of China's judiciary to help bring about greater judicial independence and professionalism and to reduce local protectionism and external interference in the judiciary; and (2) developing civil procedure reforms. 2. We are working with the Shanghai courts on a number of civil litigation reforms, including expansion of the pretrial process, use of court-supervised alternative dispute resolution, establishment of simplified processes such as small claims courts, and improvement of appellate review. 3. We have been working with the Legislative Affairs Commission of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC) to assist in their efforts to draft China's first detailed legislation on the collection and use of evidence in criminal cases, involving issues of a "right to silence" during police interrogation of suspects; developing ways for courts to handle illegally-seized evidence; expanding the use of witnesses at trial; and developing more "adversarial" processes in criminal cases, with a greater role for defense counsel and new roles for judges. 4. We have been working on a separate but parallel project on the collection and use of evidence in criminal cases with an academic group under the auspices of China University of Politics and Law. This group is developing a "scholars' draft" of a criminal evidence law and also an academic book. 5. We are working with leading academics and other legal experts to develop proposals for replacing or fundamentally reforming China's system of "reeducation through labor," one of the most serious human rights problems in China. 6. We are undertaking a cooperative project with the Institute of Law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's leading legal research body, to assist it as it develops policy recommendations to government leaders on judicial structure, judicial independence, judicial review, and the relationship between the media and the courts. 7. We are working with the NPC Legislative Affairs Commission and other experts to assist in their efforts to draft China's first comprehensive tort law, a crucial step toward enhancing Chinese citizens' legal rights and the basis for the development of a civil liability system. 8. We are working with scholars to explore short-term and long-term mechanisms for developing a system of constitutional review in China.
A second major focus of the Center's activities is administrative
law and regulatory reform. Administrative law is a key mechanism
for improving government regulatory policies and increasing the
predictability, openness, and fairness of China's vast bureaucracies
in their pervasive interactions with both ordinary citizens and
business. Important debates are underway in China about the appropriate
substantive role of government in regulating social and economic
activity as well as the procedures that government regulators use
when taking administrative action. Regulatory reform is particularly
important as China moves from a planned economy and must decide
what activities to regulate, who has the authority to regulate,
what regulatory tools to use, and what procedural protections to
provide. Our Center has a number of projects underway in these areas:
2. We are working with a team of Chinese academics and government officials, under the auspices of China University of Politics and Law and the National School of Administration, to examine ways to strengthen China's Administrative Litigation Law, one of the most important statutes adopted since China's legal reforms began, which gives Chinese citizens limited rights to sue government agencies and officials who violate the law. 3. We are working with the State Council and non-governmental actors to develop ideas and rules to increase "social trust" (shehui xinyong) in economic and social transactions, by creating fair credit reporting systems, more open channels of information, and other measures. 4. We are working with the Shanghai Municipal Government, the Shanghai People's Congress and other Chinese experts to assist in developing a new approach to professional and business associations, to allow them to be more independent, self-funded, and self-regulating interest groups instead of extensions of the government bureaucracy. 5. We are working with the OLA, the Shanghai Municipal Government's Office of Legal Affairs, and Chinese scholars on independent projects to help develop open government information legislation that will make government-held information more readily accessible to the public and thereby help ensure more effective and responsible governance. 6. We are working with OLA, the Shanghai Municipal Government, and an academic group (the Administrative Legislation Research Group) on projects to develop procedures for public participation in administrative rulemaking, including public hearings and notice-and-comment procedures. 7. We are working with government and academic experts to assist in the development of an Administrative Procedure Law to enhance openness, fairness and accountability in bureaucratic decisionmaking and rulemaking. 8. We are working with the NPC Legislative Affairs Commission and academic experts to assist in their efforts to revise China's Company Law, the framework law in China that regulates the formation, ownership and governance of businesses.
A third area of focus of the Center's work is legal education. Legal education is a key arena in advancing the rule of law in China because training Chinese law students will shape the future of China's legal profession and legal system, and because the research and writing done at Chinese law schools is a main source of new ideas about legal reform in China. Chinese legal education has developed extremely rapidly over the last 20 years. Whereas China had only two functioning law schools at the end of the Cultural Revolution, today it has more than 300. However legal education in China is also facing many challenges. It is widely recognized that law schools there need to modernize the generally abstract and formalistic style of legal education that currently prevails with new approaches to legal education that emphasize critical and policy-oriented thinking, including new teaching methods and new types of course materials. The main focus of the Center's work thus far has been helping Chinese law schools develop clinical legal education programs. Jay Pottenger, Nathan Baker Clinical Professor of Law, has led our efforts in this area. |