Drawing on empirical data collected from petitioners in Chinese courts, this article analyzes how the regime's political concern for social stability transforms petitioners' disputes and shapes the evolution of their legal consciousness. Compared with first-time petitioners who often address...

Drawing from detailed courtroom discourses on divorce cases in China, this article provides a micro-level comparison between two styles of case handling: mediatory and legalistic. The two styles differ in discourse multiplicity, discourse interchange, interruption, and dispute processing. It...

Based on in-depth fieldwork investigations and extensive interviews, this article demonstrates that adjudication has replaced mediated reconciliation and become the dominant way of handling seriously contested divorce petitions in contemporary China. Specifically, for first-time petitions,...

The way in which formal contract enforcement becomes effective is a critically important but understudied question for law and development studies. Primarily drawing on field investigations, this paper compares the enforcement performance of two basic-level courts in China, one in a more...

Drawing upon data interviews with Chinese judges who were involved in the decision-making process, we develop two variables for analyzing the influence of social ties, or guanxi, in the judicial setting. The first differentiates the strength of guanxi – whether it is strong or weak. The second...