Title
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions: How to Use Text as Data in the Field of Chinese Law
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Abstract
Since 2014, Chinese courts have placed tens of millions of court judgments online. We analyze the promise and pitfalls of using this new data source, highlighting takeaways for readers facing similar issues using other collections of legal texts. Drawing on 1,058,986 documents from Henan Province, we identify problems with missing data and call on scholars to treat variation in court disclosure rates as an urgent research question. We also outline strategies for learning from a corpus that is vast and incomplete. Using a topic model of administrative litigation in Henan, we complicate conventional wisdom that administrative lawsuits are an extension of contentious politics that give Chinese citizens an opportunity to challenge the state. Instead, we find a high prevalence of administrative cases that reflect an underlying dispute between two private parties, suggesting that administrative lawsuits are often an attempt to enlist help from the state in resolving an underlying civil dispute.
Disciplines
Courts | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Benjamin L. Liebman, Margaret Roberts, Rachel E. Stern & Alice Z. Wang,
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions: How to Use Text as Data in the Field of Chinese Law,
8
J. L. & Courts
177
(2020).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/2039
Appendix
Comments
© 2020 by The University of Chicago.