Research On Judicial Impartiality

It is often deemed that“judicial impartiality”equates“procedural justice”. The reason for this thought is that judges are masters of the proceedings, and the impartiality of judges is the most basic and most important factor to achieve justice finally. Judges should try their best to maintain impartiality, and this is the minimum requirement of procedural justice.As judicial impartiality is the core value of procedural justice and an important guarantee for substantive justice, this dissertation focuses on the issues about judicial impartiality in the field of criminal proceedings. Although the issues about judicial impartiality are mainly judicial ethical issues, but this dissertation is not limited to the field of judicial ethics as such a cramped, narrow field. This dissertation focuses more on the theoretical issues– the current existing conflicts between the criminal justice system, criminal proceedings and the requirements of judicial impartiality. The contents of this dissertation can be roughly divided into two parts: ontology of judicial impartiality and the specific regulations of judicial impartiality. The first half part of this dissertation is about the ontology of judicial impartiality, that is some basic theoretical issues, specifically including the concept of judicial impartiality, legal basis of judicial impartiality, assessment standards of judicial impartiality, values of judicial impartiality, patterns of judicial impartiality, and guaranteeing systems of judicial impartiality; the second half part of this dissertation examines the current existing conflicts between the criminal justice system, criminal proceedings and the requirements of judicial impartiality, and tries to figure out some suggestions to resolve the problems.This dissertation attempts to focus mainly on the first half part, because the ontology of judicial impartiality is more universal and more general for criminal, civil and administrative litigations and many other areas of litigation by contrast with the latter part of this dissertation. Therefore, it has more academic vitality and appeal.With respect to the latter part of this dissertation, it is limited by the author’s limited expertise and academic ability. So it looks more like an inventory about what the author has learned during his comprehensive study for seven years in the specific field of criminal procedure.The author has some novel arguments about the ontological problems of judicial impartiality. These novel arguments are regarded as very important by the author. However, the author is not quite sure about whether his teachers and colleagues will agree with him on these so-called“novel arguments”. The author will appreciate any comments.