The Bilateral Faces Of Jury System

With the development of the judicial reform, jury system has become the chief focus of legal research and judicial practice. Although"The Decision of Improvement on People's Jury System"had been passed by The NPC Standing Committee on the 28th of August in 2004, the related theoretical research would not be finished. Based on a large number of materials, the paper tries to research the jury system's bilateral faces from the point of function, that is, jury system from bi-dimensional viewpoints of adjudicative function and political function. The paper includes six parts as follows.Introduction: Returning to jury system itself. This part briefly discusses the motivation, object and background of the paper.Part One: The bilateral faces of jury system. Firstly, this part reviews the present conditions of the research of jury system in China, and finds that scholars usually use two methods. The first one is to distinguish jury system from assessor system and analyze these two systems'historical, cultural and institutional differences. The second way, quite on the contrary, focuses on the jury system itself and regards the jury system as a political system as well as a judicial institution so as to find out the various aspects of the jury system. Then, the author balances the pros and cons of these two methods and therefore puts forward the new method focusing on the adjudicative function and political function of the jury system as well as the relation between these two functions. And this part also introduces the framework of this paper.Part Two: The adjudicative function of jury system. Matters of fact and matters of law are the two chief problems which must be resolved in the adjudicative process, so the study on the adjudicative function of jury system is divided into two parts. The first part is the function of determining matters of fact. The author analyzes the relation between adjudicative facts and original facts, and demonstrates that the burden of determining the matters of fact could be reasonably assumed by jury system from the...