Supreme courts should give guidance to the development of the law and provide legal unity. This is what contributors of the new book "Surpreme Courts in Transition in China and the West” argue. The edited volume was published by Prof. C.H. van Rhee from Maastricht University and Prof. Fu Yulin from Peking University with support of the China-EU School of Law. Twelve scholars examine the differences and similarities between the Supreme People’s Court of Mainland China and those that follow Western models, namely in the United Kingdom, the Nordic Countries, the Netherlands, Spain, German speaking countries, Chile, France, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy.
For China, the Chinese authors argue, there should be more emphasis on the procedure for reopening cases. When selecting these cases, public goals such as uniformity in the application of law should be the leading criteria instead of an aim such as providing justice in the individual case. The chapters on Western-style supreme courts also hold the opinion that there should be adequate access filters; however, they consider the procedure of reopening cases to be problematic from the perspective of the finality of the administration of justice.
All of these authors offer ideas that will help supreme courts in both the East and the West to reduce unmanageable caseloads, and to avoid divergences in the case law of the supreme court. They suggest for instance smaller panels of judges, assistance of support staff in legal research and writing court decisions, selection criteria mainly based on public interest, applying existing criteria narrowly and continuing legal education of lower judges in order to prevent mistakes at lower courts. As a result, the editors hope, these courts will be better able to assist in the interpretation and clarification of the law, to provide for legal unity, and to give guidance to the development of the law.
Prof. Dr. C.H. van Rhee from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, specializes in comparative civil procedure and court organization. He is the chair of one of the working groups of the European Law Institute and Unidroit in charge of drafting European Rules of Civil Procedure. Prof. Dr Fu Yulin from Peking University School of Law is a leading Chinese specialist in civil procedure, evidence, arbitration and dispute resolution. She is responsible for major publications in the field of Chinese and comparative civil procedure and has supervised the translation of important procedural works into Chinese.She served as a judge in the Wuhan Maritime Court and is an arbitrator at the China International Economic and Trade Arbitration Committee (CIETAC).
Text and Photo by Springer
