Growth and Survival
An Ecological Analysis of Court Reform in Urban China

Employs a framework rooted in social ecology and historical institutionalism to explain recent changes to China's judiciary.

Jonathan J. Kinkel (Author)

9781316514368, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 9 June 2022

250 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.7 cm, 0.45 kg

'In his ground-breaking book Growth and Survival, Kinkel creatively bridges the balkanized scholarships on courts and the legal profession in China with fine-grained empirical data and an ecological theory of judicial reform. Situating Chinese courts in both space and time, the book is an important contribution to China studies, sociolegal studies, and research on authoritarian judiciaries.' Sida Liu, University of Toronto

Bridging disparate literatures on courts and the legal profession in China, Jonathan J. Kinkel introduces an innovative cross-disciplinary framework to understand the reality of Chinese politics and society. Fusing a variety of perspectives from social ecology, historical institutionalism, and empirical legal studies, Kinkel contextualises patterns of court reform within China's rapid economic and social transformations. This book's extensive case studies emphasise the dynamic expansion of the legal system in the post-Mao reform period and demonstrate that law firm growth in large cities, especially in the early twenty-first century, pressured courts at the local and national levels to enhance judicial autonomy. Advancing debates on the multiplicity of political-legal regimes, this book offers a comprehensive, empirical account of how reforms in both the public and private arenas can interact and operate alongside one another.

List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction
1. An ecological theory of court reform in Urban China
2. The judicial cadre evaluation system: foundational institutional incentives undergirded by “intra-state legibility”
3. High-end demand for legal services and local pressure to professionalize the judiciary
4. Expansions in competitive promotion and the implications for judicial autonomy
5. Court personnel, bureaucratic specialization, and the limits of top-down theory
6. Conclusion
Index.

Subject Areas: Judicial powers [LNAA1], Courts & procedure [LNAA], Legal system: general [LNA], Legal skills & practice [LAS], Economic growth [KCG], Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP]