In the last thirty years, the legal system in mainland China has undergone a process of transformation and reform, leading to changes in Chinese litigation practices. The author of this book presents an empirical qualitative study of the generic features of civil judgments and the writing rules, conventions, and manipulations made by judges and lawyers.
The data analyzed in this book include a corpus of Chinese civil judgments (100 cases), interviews with seven lawyers and three judges, statutes, legal news reports, and law-related documents by provincial courts and authorities. The author analyzes how Chinese judges manipulate rules and conventions to solve situation-specific problems, evaluate the arguments of both parties, quote the law, and hand out judgments.
The data are analyzed by applying the methods of move analysis, lexico-grammar, and discourse coherence. The author analyzes the required and optional moves and their conventional textualization in civil judgments. He also makes a lexico-grammatical analysis of the monetary and temporal expressions and meta-discourse in civil judgments. It is argued that civil judgments are aimed at reporting how the results of litigation are achieved, and that judges use metadiscourse to mitigate the disputes between the two parties and interpret the law and related legal principles to build legal bases for litigation.
The author also interprets civil judgments from textual, intertextual, analysts', and specialists' perspectives and puts forward the following research findings. Generally speaking, civil judgments should be clear, precise, unambiguous, flexible, and versatile. Specifically, the moves of heading, introduction, and court decisions should be formalistic and standardized. However, the argumentation and legal reasoning reflected in the moves of parties' arguments, judges' arguments, and judges' opinions should be flexible. These findings might be helpful for the improvement of the readability, accessibility, and coherence of civil judgments.
In addition, the author explores methods for acquiring a coherent reading of civil judgments at the linguistic level and the discursive level. He suggests that readers should acquire some social and legal knowledge, such as legal terms and expressions, the specialized meanings of everyday language in a legal field and the strategies of argumentation in the context of litigation practices and sociolegal culture.
In sum, this research has theoretical and pedagogic significance. This is a pioneering empirical study of the roles, textual features, and contextual interpretations of Chinese civil judgments from the perspective of applied genre analysis, which could reflect the ongoing judicial reform in China to some extent. The research findings could be used in the design of pedagogic tasks in legal teaching and training so as to improve students' reading and writing abilities and their competence in handling civil judgments. This book is a useful reference for researchers, legal professionals, and students who are interested in discourse analysis, genre studies, pragmatics, applied linguistics, and contemporary China studies.
