Value, Rule, And Practice

The people's assessor system in China is an important form of a democratic system of justice. This paper retrospects the development of China's assessor system and its operational characteristics, and conducts the in-depth research on the operation of the current assessor system. A case study of a court H is included in this research. From three different aspects of the assessor system, i.e., the adoption of value objectives, institutional arrangements and practical operation, the author discusses existing problems, causes and solutions.This paper is focused on the following three questions: How is the contemporary system of people's assessors evaluated? What kinds of changes have taken place in the operation of the people's assessor system? What are the causes and what could the future be?The paper presents the following preliminary conclusion:Firstly, the assessor system should be evaluated at two levels, including the political value and the judicial value. The political value of the assessor includes political participation, judicial democracy and restriction of power, while the judicial value includes the Fact-Finding, implementation of the general public values, and the legitimate results of the trial. Therefore, the assessor system should be theoretically evaluated at double levels.Secondly, through the empirical study, the author discovered that the phenomenon of the "Assessor Variation" came forth in the operation of the assessor system. The assessor system in practice can not achieve its default objectives, i.e., political democracy and justice, but is driven by profit, which is reflected by"double deviation"in practice, i.e.,"value"and"text","text"and"practice". This discovery refines the single-deviate structure of"representation"and"practice"proposed by Philip Huang, and enriches the theoretical framework of research on the assessor system.Finally, the author pointed out that there are four reasons for "Assessor Variation". The first is the flaws in the system design. These flaws led to the formal rules can not achieve their values by themselves. The second is the the conflict and the abuse in the judicial system also weakened the efficiency of the people's assessor system. The third is the interference of interest in the system operation. The court pursues the lower judicial cost and the higher efficiency, while assessors were given income and the "judicial relations resources".The fourth is the deficiencies of the civil political culture. Since without the cultural environment of the assessor system, all kinds of informal rules from traditional Chinese culture influence the operation of the assessor system and interrupt the implementation of formal rules. For the above problems, the author proposes solutions to improve and perfect the assessor system of China from"system","culture"and other points of view.