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Dancing with Shackles: Judge’s Engagement in Court Conciliation of Chinese Civil Cases

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Abstract

Court conciliation conducted by judges in Chinese people’s courts has been playing a vital role in resolving civil disputes. When it heaps praises and compliments, it also faces severe criticisms such as pressing parties to settle due to judges’ over-engagement. To date, except for mere criticisms from the legal literature, few efforts have been made to reveal how judges get engaged linguistically in conciliation and whether their engagement exceeds the limit in each phase of court conciliation. This paper, taking the engagement system of the appraisal framework and the exchange structure model as the theoretical basis, aims to analyze the features of judges’ engagement and the underlying forces that influence their engagement. Data-analysis shows that for court conciliation conducted in court, judges often employ dialogically contractive resources in uni-directional information exchange structures to warrant their engagement. Under the co-influence of the driving and curbing forces, judges are often “dancing with shackles” in court conciliation.

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Notes

  1. The Corpus for Legal Information Processing System (CLIPS) is a wide collection of legal discourse, including written and oral discourses of legislation, judiciary, law enforcement, law dissemination and other law-related discourse in China. It is designed and constructed by Professor Du Jinbang and his colleagues in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Encoded on the basis of the Discourse Information Analysis proposed by Professor Du Jinbang in 2007, the CLIPS is the first of its kind in China that pays keen attention to information exchange in the legal discourse.

  2. <http://grammatics.com/appraisal/AppraisalGuide/UnFramed/Stage5-Engagement.htm>, visited on October 2012.

  3. See note 2.

  4. See note 2.

  5. All the examples in this paper are extracts of court conciliation translated literally by this author. Initialized letters such as I and R at the very beginning of the sentence represent moves of the exchange structures. The words in underline indicate the discourse semantic engagement resources used by judges in conciliation. The words in brackets are added by this author to show details of the engagement resources.

  6. The China Court Net (www.chinacourt.org/) is the largest and most authoritative legal website in China established with the approval of and supervision by the Supreme People’s Court of the People’s Republic of China. Its program xianzai kaiting (now in session) offers online reports of the proceedings in Beijing from May, 2003, and provides links for other local courts’ online reports of the trials. It is noteworthy that these reports record verbatim what happens in court, but they are not equal to court records which have to be proofread, ascertained and signed by parties.

  7. For more details, see the conversation between Confucius and Yan Yuan, one of his students, in the 12th volume of The analects of Confucius.

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Acknowledgments

This paper is a part of the Philosophy and Social Science Research Program (GD11XWW09, 11YJC74008). I’m deeply indebted to Dr. Anne Wagner for her encouragement in the writing of this paper. My sincere thanks also go to Prof. Du Jinbang for his supervision and support.

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  1. School of English for International Business, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China

    Youping Xu

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Correspondence to Youping Xu.

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Xu, Y. Dancing with Shackles: Judge’s Engagement in Court Conciliation of Chinese Civil Cases. Int J Semiot Law 28, 209–226 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-013-9354-5

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