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LRCCS Noon Lecture Series | Zoom Webinar: "The People’s Courts Forty Years On - Appraisal and Argument"

Nicholas Howson, Pao Li Tsiang Chair Professor of Law, Michigan Law School
Tuesday, December 8, 2020
12:00-1:00 PM
Off Campus Location
The Fall 2020 lecture series will be only available on-line as a Zoom webinar. Registration link below.

The PRC’s post-1978 court bureaucracy is assumed to be the cat’s paw of an all-encompassing and authoritarian system of social control—lacking everything from political independence to the technical competence required to play a robust role in contemporary China’s increasingly complex economic system and contentious civil society. This easy appraisal of the function and performance of the People’s Courts at all levels in contemporary China is not accurate now, if it ever was, and ignores concurrent developments in the surrounding political legal system, including the application of a new generation of substantive and procedural laws and regulations, the rise of a private bar intent on pushing the boundaries of professional autonomy, the increased (legal) sophistication and autonomy of PRC judicial officials, and the expansion of the public law and administrative law spheres. Professor Howson will review what the PRC People’s Courts have become in the civil, criminal and administrative law spheres over the past 40 years along three distinct lines of inquiry – (technical) competence, (bureaucratic) autonomy, and (political) independence, and make an argument as to how this key institution may shape the future of China’s “Socialist Legality” and the national governance system.

Nicholas Howson is the Pao Li Tsiang Chair Professor of Law at the Michigan Law School. A specialist in Chinese law and legal institutions and developing Chinese jurisprudence, he is a former partner of the New York based international law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where he was a managing partner of that firm’s Asia Practice based in Beijing. Starting in the late 1970s, he has spent more than a decade as a student, scholar, and practicing lawyer resident in Beijing and Shanghai, has been active in the Chinese courts and US and international judicial fora as both an advocate and expert witness on Chinese law, and since the late 1990s has advised the National People’s Congress and PRC ministries on the drafting and amendment of key Reform era statutes and administrative regulations, including the 1999 PRC Securities Law, the 2006 PRC Company Law and the 2020 PRC Securities Law.

Register for this webinar here: https://umich.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0AdD6iNDS6-iXL0BS_AaXw
Building: Off Campus Location
Location: Virtual
Event Type: Livestream / Virtual
Tags: Asia, Chinese Studies, Law
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, International Institute, Law School, Asian Languages and Cultures