Disaggregating the Court: A Methodological Survey of Research on the Supreme People's Court of China

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to sort through the recent academic literature on the Supreme People’s Court of China. It separates existing studies into three basic categories: those that study what the Court is allowed to do, those that study what it actually does, and those that study why it does those things. Moving from the first category to the second and third is, in many ways, a progression from a predominantly formalist method to more realist ones. The essay argues that the field suffers from a lack of rigorous political economy modeling, and that this affects not only the thoroughness of studies in category three, but also those in categories one and two. Remedying these problems will depend on whether future scholarship can successfully make use of the theoretical and empirical tools developed by political science and institutional economics. Most importantly, the field needs to develop a usable model of individual judge behavior, based on their material incentives, political aspirations, and ideological commitments, which can then provide the foundation for modeling of the Court as an institution. At the early stage, ethnography and biographical analysis may be more useful than quantitative analysis.