Dispute formatting: dispute transformation in case filing

Definition of disputes—defining adjudicability

Judge A’s words show that due to limited legal knowledge and traditional views, people usually adopt the form of self-appeal at lower level courts. Judges responsible for filing cases are usually the first person that a plaintiff consults. Judges assume both the responsibility for case filing and for legal consultation. At the same time, they also filter and exclude unacceptable cases. According to Term 119 in the “Civil Law” (2012),⁸ a lawsuit must meet the following conditions: (1) Plaintiffs are citizens, legal representatives, and organizations whose interests are immediately involved; (2) the defendant is known; (3) plaintiffs have detailed appealing and related facts and reasons; (4) cases must be under the domain of civil lawsuits and the geographical domain of the administration of the people’s courts. The review of all the above conditions of lawsuit is usually not disclosed and is related to changes in legal policy in different times and regions (Zhang 2009b). Only a dispute that meets the above conditions can be admitted as a case. However, many plaintiffs in County A request a winning outcome but rarely consider whether their disputes are qualified to be filed as a case. According to Gallagher (2006), although plaintiffs only have obscure and incorrect knowledge about their ascribed rights and about legal procedures, they have high expectations that they can obtain protection from courts. As they engage with the legal system, plaintiffs’ legal sensibility changes along two disconnected dimensions: feelings of legal power and its effects, and evaluation and beliefs about the legal system. When judges in the case-filing system explain whether or not a case can be established according to legal terms and adjusted according to legal policy, they are actually conveying a message about the effect of the law and the idea of the legal system.

Chinese courts have long adopted “case filing with screening”,⁹ rather than with registration.¹⁰ When screening disputes, courts (specifically, the judge responsible for filing a case) only have the opportunity to admit a portion of disputes through the operation of laws, in order to streamline the adjudication process. Some disputes are filtered in the process of case filing. Only filtered disputes can formally enter the legal process (Guo 2013). The above screening and filtering processes include a legal evaluation of the condition of a dispute, such as whether or not the dispute is under the scope of the case filing. If a case does not fall within the court’s responsibility, then it is not admitted. The legal evaluation of conditions of acceptance is always transparent, while lower level courts keep the political conditions of admission hidden (political evaluation), as a result of the sensitivity of specific disputes as well as local policy. For instance, it is clearly acknowledged that the following types of disputes in the people’s court of County A must receive approvals by vice presidents before these cases can be filed: (1) disputes related to social and political stability, especially sensitive cases, and class suit (2) cases that must be heard for special reports by the Party Committees, the People’s Congresses, and the upper-level courts, (3) cases related to governmental matters above the level of country and street, or at the city level, and (4) other cases that need reporting. ¹¹The court office responsible for case filing cannot decide to admit these types of disputes, because they are related to political and social stability. Instead, such cases have to be checked by court leaders who have more sensitive political consciousness. Initially, courts would avoid controversial issues. A dispute that can be tried does not only depend on meeting legal conditions but also depends on meeting local requirements regarding social and political stability. This is referred to as “politically legal logic” (Ding 2014). In the process of a lower level legal practice, the legal process (including case filing) is a complicated organizational and political process where multiple subjects (e.g., presidents and vice presidents of courts, judges, local officials) all can exert influences. Legal procedures are usually influenced by local governments, while local political legitimacy to a large extent formalizes the operations of the legal process (Liu 2005). This fact also reflects the competition between the inner logics of the specific power relationship and legal operations in legal practice (Bourdieu 1999). Specifically, during a case-filing procedure, the competition is reflected by filtering out various disputes that are difficult for a trial resolution or related to the benefit of court-level governments. In other words, power constrains dispute qualification such as whether or not a case can be filed, whereas laws constrain the domain, such as the types of disputes and cases.

Legal naming of a dispute—the reason for a case

Fortunate cases that are able to pass checks by case-filing judges and the vice president of courts are still not cases. To be a case, a dispute needs to obtain a name in a legal sense, which is the reason for the case. The reason for the case reflects the attributes of its civil legal relationship. After a case-filing court accepts a plaintiff’s request to proceed with the case as a lawsuit, the case still must go through some legal operations, in order to name it with a corresponding name—the reason for the case—from the system of legal rules and principles. Various names exist to describe the reason for a case. In civil case reasons, for example, it is common to see divorce, contracts for purchase and sale, financial transactions, labor disputes, and property ownership.

In this sense, the same disputes, incidents, people, and behaviors can be explained by totally different names and interpretations (Zhu 2010). A case name usually originates from a legal field, but not from the field of social relationship. Different names indicate different ways to achieve settlements. Previous legal experience and guidance from a plaintiff both have strong influence towards determining the reason for a case (Merry 2007). Laws usually ask plaintiffs to integrate their lawsuit appeal into appropriate case reasoning, when they appeal to courts. Ideally, when plaintiffs have a good sense of the law, they can discuss reasons for the case with judges. But in practice, judges usually dominate the interpretation of reasons for cases in local courts, because plaintiffs usually lack knowledge of the law. The legal process proceeds after step-by-step explanations and guidance from judges. In other words, judges obtain the right to explaining case reasoning because of their professional knowledge, while plaintiffs cannot claim their rights to determine case reasoning because of their poor legal knowledge. It is clear that the determination of the reason for a case does not merely rely on legal rules but also depends on the practical interactions between judges and plaintiffs.

Also, the establishment of reasons for a case is related to flexibility in case filing,¹² and helps judges grasp the focus of disputes. “Rule of case reasons” (2011) specifies that choosing an appropriate case reason is the obligation and responsibility of plaintiffs. Courts also need to respect plaintiffs’ choices rather than choosing for them. If a plaintiff files a case reason that is incorrect, but does not change it after the judge’s explanation, the appeal should be denied. In practice, courts usually correct inappropriate case reasons through explanations, in order to avoid confusion over legal relationships in later trials. This establishment of case reasons is closely related to the use of language, because “law is the law of language…morals and ethics may be included in human actions, but laws are generated by languages (Tiesma 2000; Guo 2013).” According to the rules of upper-level courts, the people’s court in County A does not admit cases related to “grain allowance”. However, under the case reason for “land arrangement” disputes,¹³ cases related to grain allowance can still be established. Here, case reasons for disputes in a legal sense can be fabricated with language. Language as a tool that laws borrow to achieve most targets can also be an important scheme by which legal power can be realized and can operate (Conley and O’Barr 2007).

According to the civil procedure, naming the wrong reason for a case may affect its qualification, trial, and applicable legal terms. Strictly speaking, a case with a wrong case reason requires a big change in the trial procedure, in order to correct mistakes in its case filing. However, in actual practice, it is not so. Judge E frankly said: “Case reasons can be adjusted during the trial process, which emphasizes substantive justice rather than the procedural justice advocated by laws.”

Changing case reasons is only one of the methods that courts use to attempt to manage, run, and handle disputes. During every step of the legal process, there are debates over whether a dispute should be explained as an issue or a case (Merry 2007). The strategies implemented by courts (e.g., whether or not to file a case, to mediate, or to take a case to trial) are determined by the case reason assigned to the dispute. The case reason also reflects a legal relationship, category, and corresponding legal strategies for the dispute. Thus, naming a dispute is not simply a matter of assigning a legal label to a case. Rather, it reflects that the dispute has been transformed, so that abstract legal rules are now connected to the complicated real-life world.

Finally, when a dispute has a case reason and moves beyond the screening process, it is internal filtering through the case-filing process. Through interactions between plaintiffs and judges responsible for filing cases, a dispute as a case acquires a new meaning (Merry 2007). As a simile, we can think about disputes as a kind of unprocessed, early stage wine; later, the wine will be mixed and its concentration is reduced. We can think of this process as the “internal filtering” stage. In the same way that this internal filtering prepares a wine for sale, so disputes are processed through internal filtering to become a case. Not only are non-legal factors such as morals and habits are extracted from the process (Liu 2014), but disputes themselves are also transformed. In other words, internal filtering includes both extractions (filtering of non-legal residuals) in a physical sense, and adulteration in a physical-chemistry sense. In other words, during the transformation from original wine to finished wine, a vintner must filter residuals, control the temperature and time, and also dilute the alcohol with water and other additives to produce a high-quality wine. Vintners who can produce wine and faithfully complete the wine process need professional training and personal experience in order to handle the procedure both accurately and appropriately. Similarly, the defining and naming of disputes requires legal filtering and adulteration, whereby some disputes are removed from consideration by the courts, including disputes with political, policy, or social factors, the facts of the dispute are conceptualized according to legal relationships, disputes are constructed according to legal terms, and disputes are re-interpreted according to appropriate case reasons. Case-filing judges to some extent play the role of vintners. Through their definitions and the legal naming of disputes, they complete a dispute-case transformation, internal-filtering the dispute from its original state to a product state consumable by the courts. However, until this transformation is complete, disputes are still not enough to be cases. They still need external packaging.

Formalization of disputes—litigation materials

To meet the form demands of case filing, plaintiffs need to provide at least three types of litigation materials: lawsuit appeal, evidence, and identity information.

Documentation of disputes—forms

After obtaining the text, evidence, and identity information for a lawsuit appeal, case-filing judges then make the “Form of Case-filing Approval” and deliver the “Notification of Admission” and the “Subpoena” to plaintiffs, before they pay for lawsuit fees.¹⁸ This compact procedure aims to deliver everything to a plaintiff all at once and to avoiding having a plaintiff come to court too many times. The people’s court of County A also supports this policy of simplifying the steps of the procedure, according to the spirit of serving the people.

“The Form of Case-filing Approval” is filed by a case-filing judge and clearly mentions a plaintiff, the basic contents of an appeal, comments regarding the examination process, and the comments regarding its approval by leaders in the case-filing office. From a procedural sense, the most important information on this form is the case-filing date and a case-filing number. The former is related to the length of time before the related trial must end, which has either a 3-month or 6-month limit starting from the case-filing date.¹⁹ The latter carries a specific number for a specific case. After being assigned a case-filing number,²⁰ a case then obtains a formal number, which is similar to an identity number.

“Notification of Admission” reiterates the appeal request, informs plaintiffs of their rights and responsibilities,²¹ and explains related issues, such as lawsuit fees.

One kind of important information in a subpoena is the date of the trial. The case-filing office usually decides the trial order. Separating the case filing from the trial is a remarkable feature that aims to ensure that judges cannot monopolize trials and hear cases for which they may have a personal bias. A case-filing office also has a corresponding schedule of cases that marks the trial date of a case. However, it does not specify which judge will preside over which trial. As Judge G explains, “After a plaintiff pays the lawsuit fee, the schedule table that identifies case and trial date arrangement then will include it.” It has a date and location so that both parties can conveniently know the trial date. Still, it does not include the name of the judge, which is to avoid interactions between the two parties and the judge, because that may affect the judge’s objective position. Occasionally, we might change a time or location, and will call and notify them.”

In summary, through formalized materials by plaintiffs and documentation by courts, disputes are further packaged as cases. Every dispute has a case file that includes digital-management information, such as a case file number, a case file date, and a trial date, as well as a lawsuit appeal text, an approval table, a notification, and a subpoena. The establishment of the above case files maintains the imprint of handling a dispute, which renders this dispute handling process to meet the requirements of the legal process. It makes the case appear to be standardized, formalized, and legalized. The establishment of case files is also a documentation process completed in preparation for possible procedural checks that may need to occur in the future. “The legal requirement of case procedures and evidence is finally reflected as the legal production of case files, because all the evidence must be found within a case-file (Zhao 1997).” This practice skill of making the forms of case files (Zheng 1997) is usually found following the trial, such as refining the contents of case files, adding more materials, re-ordering all lawsuit documents, and creating a booklet from them (Ding 2014). This study analyzes the production of case files from the perspective of case filing and emphasizes the importance of case forms and the production of documentation.

This work compares disputes after internal filtering to wine production. After the stage of external packaging, formalized materials are like bottles of refined wine, which are also labeled with dates of production (dates of case filing) and series numbers (case-filing numbers). Similar to the process of wine production—from original wine to final wine to bottled wine to packaged wine (please refer to the below Fig. 1), disputes (original wine) meet legal requirements once they become a case (packaged wine). The case then waits to be handled in another space (trial court).

The meaning of dispute formatting

In the stage of internal filtering, defining a dispute means evaluating whether or not a case can be tried. Legal rules and political and social stability both intervene in this stage and shape the conception of the scope of legal power and the legal system. Dispute formatting also reflects the competition between the special power relationship and the inner logic of legal operations in the practice of law. The case checking process excludes many cases using the logic of political law, by constraining the rights of plaintiffs to appeal. This is also the reason for “case-filing difficulty”. In order to implement the basic strategy of governing the country by law, our country has, since May 1, 2015, pushed forward the new scheme of case registration, which forbids admission conditions other than legal rules. Many illegal policies regarding case filing have been revised or abolished.²² However, case registration does not reduce the difficulty of bringing a lawsuit. It only focuses on checking over disputes brought to courts and still emphasizes legal formatting. On the one hand, the new law still emphasizes the conditions of lawsuits in the dispute check process. Courts are required to explain to a plaintiff why a case cannot be tried.²³ It also stresses that laws should not be ignored because of other factors and that courts should more closely follow the legal requirements to formalize and filter disputes. On the other hand, regarding the complexity of disputes, “Comments on Case Filing” (2015) and “Rules of Case Filing” (2015) both illustrate the types of cases that cannot be admitted,²⁴ especially those not considered to be under the domain of the people’s courts. This fact indicates that the new process of case registration does not necessarily mean all disputes can be accepted by the courts. This reform does not refuse case examination by the courts, but in fact asks courts to include the previous hidden procedure of dispute checking within the formal procedure, in order to give plaintiffs enough protection in the case-filing procedure (Xu and Yuanjie 2015).

The naming of a dispute (the case reason) displays the constructed and conceptualized facts and the source of facts obtained from explanations in daily legal practice. The interpretation right is inconsistent with the determination right of case reasons. With the help from the power of language, having a broader set of instances for when certain case reasoning apply can be an important approach to court and dispute management. In local courts, insufficient legal sense, legal knowledge, lawsuit ability, and experience leads to difficulty in identifying and choosing an appropriate case reason. Then case-filing judges’ explanations of case reasons can exert a strong influence on plaintiffs. On the one hand, judges need to provide the necessary guidance and explanations to plaintiffs according to the spirit of “justice for people”. On the other hand, legal practice requires that plaintiffs’ right to bring a lawsuit be respected. In order to meet the format of case reasoning, adjusting case reasons is reflected as follows: plaintiffs advance disputes to courts and ask for legal solutions; but whether or not disputes are suitable for legal solutions or can be tried must be understood within the system of legal concepts and rules. Disputes are converted to cases after being defined and named. To describe this internal-filtering process, this work adopts the analogy of wine filtering and adulteration. After legal filtering and adulteration, disputes are modified to accommodate legal demands.

During the stage of “external packaging”, disputes are formalized, as can be seen in the process of writing the text of the lawsuit, as well as in preparing evidence and identity materials. A lawsuit text that follows the appropriate formula displays a case structure and thus appears as a lawsuit appeal, and even references appropriate legal items. However, the structure of cases sometimes differs from the social facts about a dispute. The key point of writing a lawsuit appeal is to meet the legal requirements of case format. In order to construct daily problems within a professional and abstract legal structure, evidence, which serves as a passport to the legal world, plays an important role. The tension between evidence requested by laws and people’s daily behavioral patterns grows across time. Moreover, the preparation of identity material requires defendants’ information, in order to meet the requirement of case format. It is obvious that a plaintiff must have a lawsuit appeal with evidence and identity materials presented within an appropriate format for a dispute procedure, before the materials can be converted to a case. Disputes that do not meet the conditions of transformation and translation cannot be packaged as cases.

The documentation of disputes is a process through which courts use a series of forms to display disputes in the format appropriate for case files. Among these files, the “Form of Case-filing Approval” includes a case-filing date and a case-filing number, while “Notification of Admission of Cases” confirms plaintiffs’ lawsuit appeals and informs them of their rights and responsibilities. A subpoena and a case arrangement form both mark the trial date of a case. Through the packaging that occurs with the arrangement form, each dispute has a corresponding case file that includes some digital information, such as a case-filing number, a case-filing date, a trial date, a lawsuit appeal, an approval form, a notification, and a subpoena. Then a dispute is maintained digitally with the support of multiple legal documents. With such elegant packaging of case files, cases also obtain a date of production and an inquiry number. The production of case files displays disputes in a documentation format that has been through as many processes as a well-packaged wine. This concludes the formatting process.

It is obvious that all steps of dispute formatting are designed to protect procedural justice. Although the operation is complicated, case-filing judges are willing to accept this procedural operation, which both alleviates any pressure they feel in handling disputes and decreases the number of responsibilities they must assume. As long as a case follows the required formula, case-filing results under the filtering-packaging mechanism can meet legal requirements. In the process of formatting, laws become a constraint on actions and limit the number of possible strategy options (Zheng 1997). In other words, some disputes have legal meanings and the values required in a trial, and can be solved by courts, whereas other disputes (such as emotional issues) are separate from legal relationships and cannot be connected to laws. The case-filing procedure controls the quality of a dispute: whether or not it meets the legal format. Only qualified disputes can be transformed so as to create a legal pathway for a solution.

Extending the discussion over dispute formatting

The extension of dispute formatting can be reviewed by comparing it to other related studies. This approach can also clarify the boundaries of this concept.

First, regarding the transformation of disputes, the aforementioned “process model” and “meaning model” represent two major pathways within existing studies. Among them, the process model acknowledges different stages of dispute transformation. However, it does not further focus on the state of a dispute once it is submitted to legal institutes. This work follows the idea of the process notion and attempts to fix the gap by analyzing the case-filing procedure. This work explains how disputes are transformed into legal cases from the perspective of case filing, emphasizing the mechanism of dispute transformation—filtering and packaging. I also include this transformation process as part of “dispute formatting”. The meaning model advances the distinction between a problem explanation and a case explanation, and the competition between factors determining the property and state of a dispute (Merry 2007). Merry’s study focuses on the fact that only if a dispute can be interpreted as a case can it be filed as a case and then enter into legal procedure. This work does not limit the scope only to the meaning of disputes, but attempts to further our understanding of case reason. After a dispute is filed as a case, the multiple explanations of a case reason require both legal knowledge and language power, which leads to an inconsistency between the interpretation right and the determination right of a case reason. Case-filing judges in local courts determine the interpretation right of case reason, by using their professional expertise and technical language. In contrast, a plaintiff’s right to determine a case reason usually cannot be realized, because of their shortage of legal knowledge and related experience.

Second, regarding the case-filing procedure, this work emphasizes the importance of case filing and primarily studies it. The aforementioned models of pyramids, pagodas, recurrent disputes, and the filtering effect should be distinguished during the case transformation procedure. It is worth noting that not all disputes can be converted to cases. The key to this transformation is the case-filing procedure. Otherwise, there is a blank and gap in the transformation of disputes. However, regarding the key issue of case-filing logic, normative studies of mainstream legal scholarship lack detailed empirical materials for analysis. Also, studies of legal sociology are scattered: they include organizational perspectives, ethics, and languages. This study on dispute formatting attempts to answer two key questions of case-filing logic: First, what is the mechanism of case filing? This work advances the filtering-packaging mechanism of dispute transformation. Most previous studies on case filing (Zhang 2009a; Fu 2011) focus on the difficulty of case filing (including case checking) but pay less attention to the inner mechanism of the case-filing procedure. Second, how does the case-filing mechanism operate? This work describes and analyzes the multiple interactions between subjects and judges through definition, naming, formalization, and documentation of disputes. Previous studies on legal sociology rarely examined the contour of the legal system through case filing. This work attempts to address this gap.

In general, neither theories of process and meaning nor existing studies fully answer the classic question of whether or not disputes brought to courts are cases. This work studies dispute formatting and attempts to address this question as well as to explain corresponding procedures and mechanisms.

Thirdly, the drying mechanism has explanatory power to explain the legal process. This work offers three extensions to the dispute formatting process: First, for research objects, the drying mechanism mainly has secret and informal effects, which occur throughout the lawsuit process until the trial is held (Liu 2014). Most studies on this mechanism focus on the whole lawsuit process and do not emphasize the key point of dispute transformation in case filing. Also, very few studies from legal sociology specifically focus on the case-filing procedure. This study specifies the effect of the drying mechanism on the case-filing process. Second, previous studies on the drying mechanism are mostly based on cases of divorce (Liu 2014) and deeply analyze the competing ethics between the two parties. They rarely focus on the case-filing procedures for general disputes, nor do they consider the working mechanism inside the courts, such as procedural operations, labor division, and the naming of case reasons. This study of dispute formatting amends these aspects. Third, drying and its auxiliary mechanism mainly describe a physical process, while the study on dispute formatting that analyzes the internal-filtering procedure includes a physical-chemistry process. This process is similar to the production line that begins with the original wine and transforms it into a saleable product: in a similar process, the legal meaning of the dispute changes. Meanwhile, the stage of formalizing and documenting the external packaging (into standard materials) further embodies disputes with rich legal meanings. The external packaging of disputes is enriched with more legal characteristics than had existed in the previous step. The transformation from dispute (original wine) to case (packaged wine) does not only include drying but also the follow steps of adulteration and packaging. The mechanism of internal filtering and external packaging can better explain dispute transformation. In summary, the drying mechanism has some limitations in explaining the process of case filing, while dispute formatting and the mechanism of filtering-packaging can help reflect, specify, amend, and push forward the explanatory power of the drying mechanism in dispute transformation.

Conclusion and limitations

The transformation of disputes into cases that can be tried also involves the connectivity between two different social fields (Xu and Ou 2015). In terms of form, case filing is an abstract stage in the lawsuit procedure. In fact, every dispute must go through this stage before being admitted into the national legal system. Admitted cases are in the legal world, while others are within the power domain of societal or governmental administration (Chu 2012). Case filing is a window into lawsuit subjects, but it is also the only way to enter the court system. Courts can only admit disputes that can be tried, in order to function efficiently and realize legal and social goals. This is the important context for governing society using laws.

Moreover, by examining the interactions between ordinary people and legal procedures, this work carefully analyzes the whole case-filing procedure and finds that contradictions exist between systematic legal logics and living logics, as well as between legal practice and daily actions. “The detachment between the system and living world” mentioned by Habermas (1984: 196) has new interpretations from the perspective of the case-filing procedure. For instance, although courts are regarded as places for justice that follow facts and rules, rules in courts are based on legal items that demand a strict corresponding relationship between evidence and legal items. The rules for ordinary people are more general: they have apparent local characteristics and are less strict in the corresponding relationship. Laws are based on legal rules, while rules of the ordinary people refer to only ethics of justice. They have different domains. Also, for the goal of resolving a dispute, although both laws and ethics pursue justice, the court’s goal is to achieve justice by examining detailed events and objects, while the goal of ordinary people is to achieve a synthetic and continuous justice that is a combination and balance of ethics, rules and laws (Wang and Wang 2012). Also, in the legal language of case filing, courts use normative, neutral, and straightforward legal language, whereas ordinary people use living language that is irregular, strongly emotional, general, and filled with moral judgment. Research on these contents as a part of the lawsuit procedure should be extended and deepened in the future.

In summary, case filing is needed for disputes to move to lawsuits and transforming disputes into legal problems that can be ruled by laws (Bourdieu 1999). Meanwhile, the living world formed through interactions and the legal system exhibits the decoupling relationship in a Habermasian sense. The behavioral logic of the living world can hardly affect the operational logic of the legal system. In a highly differentiated and self-sufficient legal system, legal agents use different languages and logics from those adopted by ordinary people in daily life (Liu 2007). As Habermas (2003) has said, laws are not only normative, but also about facts. In the realm of law, the inner tension between legal facts and norms is reflected in the tension between definite rules and the application of laws. This tension guarantees the ruling power of the legal world on the living world and helps the legal world obtain basic elements from the living world. This tension prevents the legal world from detaching from the living world and also represents legal rules in the living world, as these two parties maintain a mutually constraining relationship.

This work attempts to deepen our understanding of the complexity of dispute transformation, but also has some limitations. First, focusing on details of case filing may lead to insufficient understanding of the entire legal practice. Second, this study attempts to clarify the importance of studying case filing through both dispute transformation and dispute resolution. By using empirical studies on the case-filing procedure to respond to various theories of dispute transformation and dispute resolution, the focus of this study is a little scattered. Third, this study attempts to advance the concept of dispute formatting in order to uniformly discuss and evince the process of dispute transformation during case filing. Although this concept is defined and compared from the perspectives of inner meaning and outer extension, this concept requires further refinement.