Workload, legal doctrine, and judicial review in an authoritarian regime: A study of expropriation judgments in China

This paper contributes one of the first systematic studies on how courts adjudicate expropriation disputes both in the absence of judicial independence and in the face of resource constraints, extends the study of judicial workload into an authoritarian context, and demonstrates the complicated and dynamic interactions between apolitical and political aspects of courts in authoritarian regimes. Our results demonstrate that legal doctrine can check the abuse of government power even in situations where it is least expected. Specifically, we examined how Chinese courts, faced with an explosive increase in workload caused by a legal reform in 2015, adjudicated expropriation disputes between the government and property rights holders. Employing a difference-in-differences method, we found that an increased judicial workload improved the chances of property rights holders winning their cases against the government. We discovered that judges’ use of hard-edged legal doctrine—administrative procedures, in particular—to save time constrained judicial discretion, which is prone to arbitrary political influence in authoritarian regimes.