Liability Beyond Law
Conceptions of Fairness in Chinese Tort Cases
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3793295 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rachel E Stern (0000-0001-9745-3433), Benjamin L Liebman (0000-0003-3416-6896), Wenwa Gao, Xiaohan Wu (0009-0002-5576-7244) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 11 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 70-93 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Asian Journal of Law and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2052-9015 • E-ISSN: 2052-9023 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/als.2023.8 |
| OpenAlex | W4389619551 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel "fair and just" in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to acknowledge traumatic harm. Considering fairness, then, returns Chinese courts to their long-standing role as managers of communities who respond to misfortune by assigning legal responsibility to relationships that range from intimate to surprisingly tenuous
Business · Compromise · Harm · Law and economics · Liability · Obligation · Political science · Sociology · Tort · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law in Society and Culture · Legal Education and Practice Innovations · Law
STM
Justice in Luritz
Of Arsenic and Old Laws
Riding the Tiger
Ruling before the Law
Law in Imperial China
Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015
Mass Digitization of Chinese Court Decisions
Legal Reform
Reforming China's Civil Procedure
Unfamiliarity and Procedural Justice
Creating a Virtuous Leviathan
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |