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Court cases in China, especially Guiding Cases (“GCs”), have become an important topic for discussion in the U.S.-China Judicial Dialogues, the first of which was held in early August 2016. The establishment of these new high-level Dialogues on judicial reform was one of the outcomes of President Xi Jinping’s 2015 state visit to the United States. In his speech delivered at this first Dialogue, Bill Baer, Assistant Attorney General of the United States, asked what the role of precedents is in providing guidance to businesses as to what behavior violates the law.
The newest issue of Guiding Cases Analytics TM titled China’s Guiding Cases System: Review and Recommendations (English; Chinese) attempts to answer this and related questions. Based on her analysis, Dr. Mei Gechlik, Director and Founder of Stanford Law School’s (“SLS”) China Guiding Cases Project (“CGCP”), notes the Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) of China’s impressive accomplishment in establishing and strengthening the Guiding Cases System. During a relatively short period of six years, the SPC has summarized a broad variety of adjudication experiences in China by issuing 64 GCs that:
- are of different types (12 criminal cases, 11 administrative cases, 10 intellectual property and unfair competition cases, and 31 other—though mostly commercial—cases);
- are based on original judgments from the SPC itself or lower-level courts located in 15 different provinces/provincial-level municipalities, covering nearly half of the 31 administrative divisions of the country; and
- address issues arising from 31 different pieces of Chinese legislation and 2 international conventions that are applicable in China.
To help the SPC achieve its goals of “unifying application of law, enhancing adjudication quality, and safeguarding judicial justice”, Dr. Gechlik identifies some GC-related activities as affording areas for improvement. She recommends, among other activities, that more GCs should be selected from provinces or provincial-level municipalities that currently have few or no GCs. Based on interesting trends, Dr. Gechlik discusses that the selection of local judgments as GCs may lead to increased awareness and pride among judges in that locality and this could, in turn, encourage more use of GCs in the adjudication of similar cases.
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