Speaker Series: Xin He
How to understand the operation of Chinese courts, especially after Xi Jinping took power and thoroughly reformed its judiciary? To what extent is it different from other judicial systems? Dr. Xin He presents a governance model. The courts have two overarching characteristics under this model: supporting the state’s goals of policy implementation and legitimacy enhancement. The various policies that the courts are tasked with implementing and the approaches the courts use for enhancing the judiciary’s legitimacy—and by extension, that of the state—have played key roles in the courts’ evolution. This governance model is distinct from the dualism and order-maintenance theses which have been used to understand the Chinese legal system in the past. It also challenges the conventional wisdom of the rule-by-law and rights-based approaches to understanding the Chinese court system. Engaging extensively with the literature in law and politics, law and society, and institutional economics, The Judicial System of China provides an understanding of the inner workings and day-to-day realities of the Chinese judicial system.
To register, contact Sophie Kofman at skofman@abfn.org.
To read the related chapter for Dr. He’s presentation, reach out to Sophie Kofman or Dianna Garzón.
Professor Xin He studies China’s legal systems empirically. He is interested in supervising Ph.D. students in the fields of judicial process (criminal justice in particular), legal consciousness, and law and gender in China.
His English monographs are:
The Judicial System of China (Oxford University Press, 2024)
Divorces in China: Institutional Constraints and Gendered Outcomes (NYU Press, 2021)
Embedded Courts: Judicial System of China (coauthored with Kwai Hang Ng, Cambridge University Press, 2017)
He also published a Chinese book 《街頭的研究者：法律與社會科學筆記》(The Researcher in the Street) (Peking University Press 2021).
An avid Pingpong player, he was the champion (men’s single) of the Central and Western District of his age group in 2019.