"More Law Cases But Few People" And Judges Reform

The establishment of specified-number-of-judge system is the core and key issue of the current round of judicial reform. Nowadays, several pilot courts throughout the country are carrying out the reform and progressing differently. However, it can be predicted that the reform means large-scale streamlining of existing judges.In the background of continuous growth of cases nationwide, are the judges so less in quantity capable to cope with cases pouring into the courts? Can the reform achieve the goal of judiciary elitism? After reducing the number of judges, how to solve the issue "more law cases but few people"? The establishment of specified-number-of-judge system concerns directly to the success of judicial reform. Once researches on the reform are divorced from the current situation of cases faced by the courts, they cannot be ideal analysis, and any good system design or theoretical arguments should be tested in reality. In academic circle, the issue "more law cases but few people" and establishment of specified-number-of-judge system have raised high and long-term concern and there have been numerous articles discussing these issues. However, it is too difficult for scholars to access the internal number of cases, staffing and other important research data, leading many academic researches to be based on national, overall and general data offered by the Supreme Court, as a result, it is a knotty question to make targeted analysis and arguments of specific issues faced by the courts. In this regard, this paper is based on the data about cases and staff of H City, S Province from 2010 to 2015, attempts to explore the specific manifestation of "more law cases but few people" in the District Court, tries to accurately define the needed contradictions and problems in the process of establishing specified-number-of-judge system in less developed areas, provides another analysis perspective for deepening judicial reform and ensuring the effectiveness of the reform, and makes several recommendations to improve the specified-number-of-judge system. The author opines that under the circumstance of "more law cases but few people", taking the establishment of specified-number-of-judge system as a separate measure will impose the burden on judges, resulting in "adverse elimination" of excellent judges, frustrating the achievement of judicial reform goal——establish a high-quality judge team.This paper is divided into five parts. The first part begins with debates on the issue "more law cases but few people" which is the background of the establishment of specified-number-of-judge system, summarizes the current analysis of the issue. The second part is based on empirical analysis of the acceptance and closure of cases in two levels of courts of H City, S Province, calculates the courts’acceptance and closure of cases in detail from 2010 to 2015, proposes several ideas on the establishment of specified-number-of-judge system. The third part is based on empirical analysis of the case load of judges, shows the current human resource allocation in two levels of courts of H City, carries out sample survey on the annual case load of trial judges on the frontline, raises some thoughts on the establishment of specified-number-of-judge system. The fourth part makes a comparative study on the number of judges and case load, after observing the number of judges and case load in UK, USA, Germany and Japan, makes a comparison between China and the four countries. The fifth part puts forward four proposals on the reform, first, courts should be staffed with balanced judges; second, establish court personnel classification system; third, courts should have a balanced distribution of cases; fourth, establish normalized exchange mechanism among legislative, executive, judicial systems.One of the shortcomings of this paper is that the author selects only one District Court as research subject and the conclusions are territorial. Besides, in terms of bringing forward suggestions for improvement of the establishment of specified-number-of-judge system, subject to the limitation of research perspective, the author’s opinions and recommendations remain superficial.