The Construction Of Civil Procedure Summary Judgment System In China

Since the middle and late of twentieth century, the trial courts’ pressure increases due to the litigation explosion in judicial practice. To balance justice and efficiency, most countries in the world gradually started to develop civil dispute resolutions. On the one hand, conciliation, mediation, arbitration and other non-litigious alternative dispute resolutions are gradually applied. On the other hand, the courts constantly adjust the proceedings of the internal structure, including valuing pre-trial proceedings, diversifying procedure in the trial in order to provide wide choices of procedures for the parties. As a dispute system in the pre-trial proceedings, summary judgment originated in the common law system. As China’s current civil procedure law vests simply about the pre-trial procedures, and it does not involve summary judgment. In the other words, all cases, regardless of simple or complex, with or without controversy, which have been put on record, must be adjudged after court verdict. At present, the depth and breadth of theoretical research on summary judgment is limited as China legal scholars and judicial studies pay little attention to it.China’s civil standardized procedure reform has gone through from simplification to normalization, and then to simplified shunt, which is a spiral process. During this process, the importance of the summary procedure gradually highlights. Although the cases diversion judicial reform is in full swing in China, the courts are still diligently pursuing the value of prudent judge and to find real facts. The article holds that, under the background of burdensome and numerous civil cases explode, except the target for the true facts, we should also pay attention to the efficiency of legal proceedings. In practice, we can see lots of civil cases which are lack of disputes on important facts, especially in simple claims and liabilities disputes and damage cases, etc. In these cases, there are no substantive point of contention between the parties, and the plaintiff sues just for a "justice", or just has dispute on the implementation. Therefore, if the court still has to finish the whole ordinary trial procedure "procedurally", lots of judicial resources will be wasted, and will cause great court pressure. So, to effectively solve these simple cases, we can learn from common legal system countries, like UK and US, to construct summary judgment system, as which the courts can judge directly in pre-trial procedure.Summary judgment system epitomizes the values of rational use of judicial resources and to promote litigation efficiency. It can effectively filter the disputed civil cases lack of important facts, improve the lawsuit efficiency, and ease the pressure of the civil trial. Because summary judgment procedures only simplify the "unnecessary" procedures, it is also conducive "to maximize the overall justice", which is beneficial to adequately protect the parties’rights to choose procedures, so that the civil procedure can properly meet the needs of the judicial practice. Thirdly, as the application scope of summary judgment is not limited to credit and debt disputes, besides it can solve disputes in the pre-trial stage, the introduction of summary judgment can also be compensated for the defects of existing supervising procedure and the summary procedure. Last but not the least, it is also conducive to enhancing the independence of pretrial in China.The construction of summary judgment under China’s current civil system is not only conform to our judicial reform trend, but also has certain legal and institutional basis. In short, our country should enhance the theoretical study and investigate on other countries. Based on this basic theory and practical experience, we should further research on the construction of the basic legal framework, the specific application rules, the effectiveness, the supporting programs and so on.