Jun 2014, Volume 9 Issue 2
    

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  • research-article
    Leslie J. MORAN

    Western scholars have argued that image making and image management are a preoccupation of the judiciary. Images of the judiciary may take a variety of forms and be produced for kinds of audiences. One form of judicial image making and image management is live performances in the courtroom and other court settings. Another is the written judgment where the preoccupation is the style of the written text. Press and other mass media reports of judicial activity are another. The audience for judicial images is equally diverse, from fellow judges, lawyers in the courts and the wider legal community, the litigants before the courts to the executive, legislature and the public both in the courtroom and beyond. The image of the judiciary that is available to the public has a particular significance in Western rule of law democracies. As a general rule courts and the judiciary are required to operate in public and their activities must be open to public scrutiny. A recent policy manifestation of this goal is debated about confidence in the justice system and initiatives designed to improve confidence. In the majority of cases public scrutiny of judicial activity and public confidence in the judiciary relies upon the media. Objective and accurate press and media reports play a key role in shaping public understanding of the judiciary and generating or undermining confidence in that institution. Reports in regional and national newspapers have long been an important source of information, shaping public knowledge and facilitating public scrutiny of the justice system. In the UK, there is almost no scholarship on these representations past or present. The result is little known about the representation of the courts and the judiciary in press reports. Little is known about what the diligent reader of these reports can learn about judicial activity. The aim of this article is to take a first step towards changing that state of affairs. It uses a data set made up of 205 contemporary domestic newspaper reports of court and judicial activity. These come from a sample of 24 daily newspapers: 10 national newspapers and 14 from the regions. All were published on Thursday 16th February 2012, an unexceptional day in the life of the justice system and the press. The modest goal of this article is to offer an analysis of this snapshot of judicial activity in the press in England and Wales. The article concludes with some reflections on the significance of the findings of this study for our understanding of the role of the press in enabling public scrutiny of the judiciary.

  • research-article
    Man-chung CHIU

    The law controlling domestic violence in Hong Kong was amended in 2008 and 2009. The revised law introduces a new injunction order which can mandate that abusers attend counseling programmes, and extends legal protection to same-sex couples. As the author have argued elsewhere, the changes in the law can create (gender/sexual) justice as both issues engage with traditional Han-Chinese culture. Nonetheless, with the implementation of the new machine, the following two questions still need to be addressed. Can the changes produce justice? What is justice? This paper investigates, in Deleuzean terms, how the machine of anti-domestic violence law in Hong Kong creates the becoming of justice. Hopefully, the examination of this issue can also shed light on the future development in mainland China of the law controlling domestic violence.

  • research-article
    JIANG Huiling

    This paper explains why Schopenhauer’s “Hedgehog Dilemma” may be the most apposite metaphor for the relationship between the courts and the media. Whatever they get from each other, the media’s role representing the public and the court’s role representing justice are both essential to modern democracy. Therefore, their relationship has attracted attention, not just in legal and media professions, but also in public and government debate. In the last two decades, China’s highest court has issued judicial interpretations and guidelines to regulate the activities of the media and the court, which has brought the topic to a new level of discussion. As a drafter of these official documents, the author will comment on development in this field and their interaction with values inherent to democracy.

  • research-article
    ZHU Xiao,Adam MOSER

    This article examines the politics, laws and policies related to regulating lead pollution from lead-acid battery related manufacturing facilities in China. Particularly, this paper examines how China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection (MEP) was able to force the temporary closure of nearly 90 percent of lead-battery manufacturing facilities within a period of months in 2011, after years of enforcement failures. The authors analyze the extent to which the Government’s response to address lead pollution was based on laws and policies that can be systematically and consistently deployed by MEP as needed, or whether such measures are reliant on political will from outside MEP. Additionally, the authors are concerned with the extent to which China’s governance response to lead pollution primarily addresses environmental and public health issues; or rather it primarily addresses political and economic development issues, and whether this difference is significant. The article makes suggestions for how China can improve its environmental enforcement, and in so doing, contributes to a growing field of scholarship that examines environmental governance issues in the context of developing countries.

  • research-article
    CHEN Rudan

    By referring to 400 WTO cases, this paper reviews the results of WTO dispute settlement proceedings and the systemic causes in order to find out whether the WTO dispute settlement system’s results reflect a clear tendency of favoring complainants, and if so, whether the internal asymmetry of the system leads to such results. Based on these findings, and by considering a number of factors, this paper analyses the influence on national interests brought about by such asymmetry, so as to find whether there is a two-way adjustment effect and relative deprivation effect for developing countries. Then, according to the current economic situations of the WTO’s Asian countries, this paper suggests that the Asian members should reform their policies to overcome the disadvantages of the WTO asymmetric proceedings. In this part, this paper comprehensively evaluates the measure of actively using the WTO dispute settlement system that favors the complainants, in order to develop overseas markets and realize potential benefits of treaty negotiations.

  • research-article
    WEI Dan

    Macao, a former Portuguese colony and now one of only two Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China, is undergoing unprecedented socio-economic growth and transformation. Using Macao as an empirical case, the paper examines the challenges of regional integration and globalization on legal theories, identifies how law interacts with other socio-cultural factors, and analyzes the self-reflection and self-adjustments of a legal culture in dynamic and diverse dimensions of time and space. The paper aims to find an innovative approach to discover the progressive pattern of inertia, evolution, survival, diffusion and interaction of a legal tradition in a global context.

  • research-article
    DONG Jingshu,WANG Zhendong

    Crimes relevant to sexual offence in the current Criminal Law of the PRC, such as the crime of rape, the crime of forcible molestation and humiliation of women, the crime of indecency with a child, establish a relatively close net for protecting female sexual rights. However, the protection of male sexual rights is surprisingly neglected or disregarded. In current China, sexual offences against males (including sexual offence against a male by male and sexual offence against a male by female) are getting worse. Unfortunately, male victims of sexual offences cannot seek for legal remedy due to the lack of legal provisions. In theory, the Criminal Law needs to bring in the protection of male sexual rights. This thesis will focus on the issue relevant to sexual offences against males on the crime of rape. The authors will present increasing evidence of sexual offences against males and explore the reasons. We will analyze the necessity of amending the provisions of the crime of rape based on theoretical and practical research, and learn from the advantages of legislations of different times and places in China and other countries. We will conclude with suggestions for amending the current Criminal Law about the crime of rape in order to fill up the gap in legal protection of male sexual rights in China.

  • research-article
    ZHU Jingwen

    Since the reform and opening up, the legal profession in China has changed dramatically. In terms of both quantity and quality, the legal profession has stepped into a new phase. A tendency towards widespread litigation and more professionals: judges, lawyers and law students, can be clearly evidenced. Along with the development of the legal profession, other types of legal workers including business arbitrators, grassroots paralegal service workers (grassroots paralegals), and mediators have experienced great changes. To a certain extent, they have become more marginalized than before. The development of the legal profession is extremely unbalanced. Whether in terms of the number of lawyers or the income generated by lawyers, the inter-provincial gap in China is huge. The development of the legal profession also brings out the issue of judicial corruption. From the number of letters and visits related to lawsuits and the National People’s Congress deputies’ votes on the reports of the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the level of legal corruption can be noted. This problem has become a crucial challenge to the reputation of the legal profession and the judicial creditability of the country. The same amount of attention should be paid to judicial corruption as to the quality of legal services.

  • research-article
    MENG Fanzhuang,CHEN Guofei

    Renmin University of China hosted the first “UK-China Conference on Public Law” on 2–6 September, 2013. The conference was a collaboration between Renmin University of China, Oxford University, University College of London (UCL), China Association of Constitutional Law, and the United Kingdom Constitutional Law Group. The conference was co-organised by Nick Barber from Oxford University, Jeff King from UCL, Han Dayuan from Renmin University and Li Ruiyi from Nankai University. It was partly sponsored by multinational law firm Clifford Chance. More than 50 Chinese and British academics participated. A range of topics was covered including the position of soft law and conventions in constitutions, constitutional structure, the rule of law, judicial independence, protection of human rights, interaction between welfare states and the rule of law, and the role of the court and the judge in regulating administration. Chinese and UK academics of public law actively participated in discussions. The conference marked an unprecedented communication and exchange on constitutionalism between Chinese and British scholars.

  • research-article
    QUAN Jiahui