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Rolling Back Transparency In China's Courts, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Xiaohan Wu, Margaret Roberts
Rolling Back Transparency In China's Courts, Benjamin L. Liebman, Rachel E. Stern, Xiaohan Wu, Margaret Roberts
Faculty Scholarship
Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made public in China between January 1, 2014, and September 2, 2018, we examine the recent deletion of criminal cases from the China Judgements Online website. We find that the deletion of cases likely results …