Liability Beyond Law: Conceptions of Fairness in Chinese Tort Cases

Empirical work consistently finds that Chinese courts resolve civil cases by finding a compromise solution. But beyond this split-it-down-the-middle tendency, when and how do Chinese courts arrive at decisions that feel “fair and just” in cases in which they invoke those ideas? Drawing on a data set of 9,485 tort cases, we find that Chinese courts impose liability on two types of parties with ethical, but not legal, obligation to victims: (1) participants in a shared activity and (2) those who control a physical space. In these cases, Chinese courts stretch the law to spread losses through communities and to acknowledge traumatic harm. Considering fairness, then, returns Chinese courts to their long-standing role as managers of communities who respond to misfortune by assigning legal responsibility to relationships that range from intimate to surprisingly tenuous.