Author ORCID Identifier
Xiaohan Wu 0009-0003-2553-2142
Margaret E. Roberts 0009-0003-2553-2142
Luke Sanford 0009-0003-2553-2142
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2025
Abstract
Courts around the world are putting their data online, making information about caseloads, parties, and decisions available to the public. Yet, this data is far from complete, and often only reflects a portion of courts’ dockets. We offer and validate a set of tools for leveraging serialized bureaucratic data from courts to estimate the proportion of cases available to the public and the time courts take to make decisions. Using data from more than 3,000 courts in China, our methods allow us to assess patterns of missingness in court data across provinces and cities by type of case and to conduct the largest quantitative analysis to date on court delay in China. By providing an extensive validation of both new and existing tools for estimating missingness and delay, we provide a set of recommendations for researchers looking to augment incomplete bureaucratic data around the world.
Disciplines
Comparative and Foreign Law | Courts | Law
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Xiaohan Wu, Margaret Roberts, Rachel E. Stern, Benjamin L. Liebman, Amarnath Gupta & Luke Sanford,
Addressing Missingness in Serialized Bureaucratic Data: The Case of Chinese Courts,
Soc. Methods & Res.
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4648