Saturday, October 28, 2023

New On the European Chinese Law Research Hub Blogsite: (1) Jerome Cohen on China in International Law; (2) Navigating Stricter Data Privacy Rules for Cross-Border Data Transfers With China; and (3) the Silent Influence of Guiding Cases

 


The folks over at the European Chinese Law Research Hub (with thanks to Marianne von Blomberg, Editor ECLR Hub, Research Associate, Chair for Chinese Legal Culture, University of Cologne) have posted  a marvelous set of discussions on a number of quote contemporary themese on Chinese law and policy.

Marianne von Bloomberg explains:

On the blog, we have the following for you:

The introduction of China's Guiding Case System has drawn much attention globally, especially so among common law scholars. However, 12 years later, the impact of guiding cases is hardly proven. Minhao Chen and colleagues applied a new method to measure the impact of the guiding cases and find: Even though barely explicitly cited, judgments reuse text uniquely traceable to them.

The picture [above] somewhat encapsulates the messy reality of cross-border data transfers. Seeking to regulate the chaos, the USA, the EU and China each adopt different approaches, as laid out by W. Gregory Voss and Emmanuel Pernot-Leplay.

Finally, Jerome Cohen, a first-generation scholar of PRC law, lays out some of his observations on China's development through the past decades. The interviewers Laura Formichella and Enrico Toti kindly shared the full conversation with us. 

One of the most interesting aspects of these studies suggests some of the interlinked issues of decision making that pose a challenge not merely in the specific context of Chinese Marxist-Leninist regulatory legality, but also pose an equally delicate challenge to the character and function of Liberal democratic legality. In both systems the issues converge: 

(1)  Convergence in dispute resolution centers on within the process of dispute resolution both between private parties, and in disputes involving the state and the discretionary decision making of its officials, to what extent and in what forms ought juridical decision making be automated, curated, or guided. For the moment for focus is on human centered and driven guidance mechanisms. But automated decision making, and perhaps first, automated quality control measures in assessing the value of judicial decision making under the shadow of human guidance (text )  appears to be just around the corner.  Its value lies in the way in which judicial decision making can be tested against iterative decision making assessed against the ideal represented by the guiding cases. In liberal democracy the same issues revolve not merely around precedent but also around judicial discretion in the face of normative shifts (social justice, for example, and sustainability) that produces a crisis of quality as well as of oversight through traditional means.

(2) Nothing paints a picture of the end of post 1945 ideals of converging globalization like the building of walls everywhere.  Walls have become a semiotic as well as a physical manifestation--especially with respect to abstractions like data and its flows. Normally data ought to flow with production--like the lymphatic system of a body of production maintained by the lubricant of data flowing constantly and in multiple directions. Yet the trend now appears to be favoring the fracturing of the body of global commerce and production. That, in part, is a defensive reaction to the growing idea that exposure to global production heightens the risk of normative  viruses that may corrupt or kill the body. How might one preserve the benefits of global production while systematically cutting off or regulating its lubricant.

(3) Historical flows are difficult objects. Its semiotics suggests that  the sense of a thing within time exists only in the moment of its capture, but that in that capturing one splits the object of history (now understood as outside of time) from the way n which one seeks to impose meaning on it from another time that is itself in flow. History, in that sense becomes a normative projection and though the facts on which it is built, though unchanging, the idea that those facts represent now assume the role and purpose of mirroring the present. It is in that sense that recollection becomes both useful and more so in understanding the present than in capturing the past.

I am cross posting the links to the essays below. The original ECLRH post may be accessed HERE. And as a plug for the marvelous work at the European Chinese Law Research Hub: if you have observations, analyses or pieces of research that are not publishable as a paper but should get out there, or want to spread event information, calls for papers or job openings, or have a paper forthcoming- do not hesitate to contact Marianne von Bloomberg.

 

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