Procedural Justice

Procedural Justice, originated from the Anglo-American Law, is regarded as "visible justice". However, it has long been neglected in the judicial practice in China in that many theories and institutions concerning law in China have been borrowed from the Continental Law, leading to the long-term practice of "emphasizing substance while neglecting proceedings". Many judges hold that fraction in the proceedings can not be considered illegitimate as long as the verdict is justified. Such practice as the neglect of procedures has done great harm to the impartiality and authority of jurisdiction. As a judge working at the grass-roots level court, the author has a strong feeling about the significance of procedural justice. That is why I choose procedural justice as the topic for research. The thesis is designed to explore how to make sure the practice of procedural justice in jurisdiction on the basis of an analysis of the hot issues that occurred in judicial practice in recent years, with the hope of shedding some light on procedural justice for readers and the expectation on judges of laying more emphasis on the importance of procedural justice so as to achieve judicial justice through procedural justice.The thesis naturally develops into four parts:Part One gives an outline of procedural justice, which explains the real meaning of procedural justice from the aspects of procedure, impartiality and justice. It also introduces the categorization of procedural justice done by Rolls and Chinese scholars together with an analysis of the internal and external values of civil litigation procedure.Part Two analyses the theoretical development of procedural justice in Anglo-American Law from an historical perspective, which mainly focuses on common law, the emergence of equity, the difference between natural justice and due process of law, adversary system and jury system.Part Three provides a list of seven principles about procedural justice including neutral judge, independent judge, constraint and supervision, equality of party, public procedure, participation of party and quiet procedure.Part Four not only gives an introduction of the systems for civil proceeding which are aimed to guarantee procedural justice, such as systems of challenge, open trial, people's assessors, judicial assistance and retrial, but also provides an in-depth analysis of the limitation present in these systems and suggestions on how to improve them.