Leniency in Chinese Criminal Law? Everyday Justice in Henan
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In recent years Chinese courts, in particular those in Henan Province, have begun to place a vast quantity of court options online. This talk examines one-year of publicly available criminal judgments from one basic-level rural county court and one intermediate court in Henan in order to better understand trends in routine criminal adjudication in China. The result is an account of ordinary criminal justice that is both familiar and striking: a system that treats serious crimes, in particular those affecting state interests, harshly while at the same time acting leniently in routine cases. Most significantly, examination of more than five hundred court decisions shows the vital role that settlement plays in criminal cases in China today. Defendants who agree to compensate their victims receive strikingly lighter sentences than those who do not. Likewise, settlement plays a role in resolving even serious crimes, at times appearing to make the difference between life and death for criminal defendants. These findings provide insight into a range of debates concerning the roles being played by the Chinese criminal justice system and the functions of courts in that system. Examination of cases from Henan also provides a base for discussing the future of empirical research on Chinese court judgments, demonstrating that there is much to learn from the vast volume of cases that have in recent years become publicly available.
Benjamin L. Liebman is the Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law and the Director of the Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School. His recent publications include “Malpractice Mobs: Medical Dispute Resolution in China,” Columbia Law Review (2013); “A Return to Populist Legality? Historical Legacies and Legal Reform,” in Mao’s Invisible Hand (edited by Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry, 2011); and “Toward Competitive Supervision? The Media and the Courts,” China Quarterly (2011).
Philippines Conference Room
Benjamin L. Liebman
Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law and Director, Center for Chinese Legal Studies
Speaker
Columbia Law School
Seminars
The Future of the US-Japan Alliance
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Ambassador Ryozo Kato, former Ambassador of Japan to the United States from 2001 - 08, the longest tenure of any Japanese Ambassador to the United States, and former Commissioner of Nippon Professional Baseball from 2008 - 2013, has had a long and distinguished career in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Japanese Government. A graduate of Tokyo University Faculty of Law and Yale Law School, he served his country in Australia, Egypt, and the United States, in addition to multiple global assignments within the Ministry in Tokyo.
Positions which Ambassador Kato served in the United States include the Third Secretary in the Embassy (1967–1969), Minister in the Embassy (1987–1990), and Consul-General in San Francisco (1992–1994). He returned to Japan to serve as the Director-General of the Asian Affairs Bureau (1995–1997) and the Deputy-General of the Foreign Policy Bureau (1997–1999). After serving as the Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs (1999–2001), he was appointed the Ambassador of Japan to the United States of America from 2001 to 2008. He has been recognized and respected on both sides of the Pacific for his outstanding understanding of the issues and his clarity in direction to resolve them.
Philippines Conference Room
Ryozo Kato
former Ambassador of Japan to the United States
Speaker
Seminars
Stanford researchers launch new approach to health policy in India
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Millions of women in India give birth at home, where they don’t have easy access to medical help if things go wrong. And things go wrong often. The country has one of the world’s highest rates of maternal and neonatal deaths.
To curb this problem, the government pays eligible pregnant women to deliver their babies in an accredited medical facility. With both a financial incentive and the promise of a safer childbirth, it would stand to reason that most Indian women should choose to deliver their babies in a hospital.
But that’s not the case.
Most babies are still born in homes. Early numbers from the financial incentive programs show less than half of eligible women are choosing to participate.
Stanford researchers Grant Miller and Nomita Divi think the answer to this quandary—and so many other well-intentioned policies that fall short—needs to first be considered from the perspective of patients, doctors and other health care providers. And that, they say, is a different approach than most health interventions take.
Miller and Divi are spearheading the Stanford India Health Policy Initiative, a program that seeks to rethink health interventions based on Indian health care users’ and providers’ motivations for seeking care. And to get there, the initiative’s focus comes from the people who confront these problems every day.
The program, which is connected to the International Policy Implementation Lab at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute, first brings together community leaders for an in-depth discussion of where best to focus efforts. Next, teams (including students) take these recommendations and spend several months conducting fieldwork to understand health care decision-making, both from the side of patients and providers. From this foundation, the initiative produces reports detailing the behavioral motivations for why certain dimensions of health care are or are not working.
“To really understand why health policies succeed or fail, you have to see the world through the eyes of the providers and patients,” said Miller, an associate professor of medicine and a core faculty member of FSI’s Center for Health Policy and Primary Care Outcome Research. “A lot of programs are created because they seem logical from the outside. But if you don't understand a patient’s priorities or motives, your program may not work.”
Miller and Divi first applied this approach to the very issue of childbirth in India. Why weren’t more women giving birth in hospitals when there were seemingly logical reasons to do so?
Over the summer, Miller, Divi, their Indian partners, and Stanford graduate and medical students set out to answer this question. During seven weeks of field interviews and subsequent analysis, the students—with guidance from Miller and Divi —identified reasons for why Indian women weren’t accepting a stipend to have their babies in the hospital. Some of these reasons included hidden costs of delivering a baby (like the transportation cost to the hospital or unexpected medical expenses), pressure from mothers-in-law to follow tradition and deliver at home, and fear of unwanted medical procedures like Caesarean sections or sterilization.
This understanding of why patients and providers don’t always make seemingly logical health care decisions is exactly what the India Health Policy Initiative is after.
“So much academic research is driven by donors or journal articles that we read,” Miller said. “So it seemed like we were starting from the wrong place in identifying health policy challenges that we should work on.”
In January, Miller and Divi convened a group of Indian health policy leaders, health care workers, academics and entrepreneurs to understand the challenges they faced in their daily work, and what health care questions they would most like to know more about. From this two-day meeting, the group identified two focus areas for the India Health Policy Initiative over the coming year: understanding more deeply the motivations and activities of both formal and informal health care providers, and what Indians value about care from the informal sector. These informal providers are often doctors or nurses with little or no medical training that are used by many low-income Indians.
To help answer these questions and provide opportunities for students, the Stanford India Health Policy Initiative engages top students from across the university. “We want to provide our students with an experience that will hopefully shape the way they think in their future careers,” said Divi, the initiative's project manager. “And we try to achieve this by training our students to help make sense of urgent health delivery challenges, immersing them in an intensive field experience, and teaching them how to generate insights.”
To better understand providers’ motivations, as well as patients’ perspectives on both the informal and formal providers, Miller and Divi will work with this new team to carry out qualitative fieldwork this summer.
Miller explained that the approach is very anthropological.
”To be able to understand these issues, we all have to see the world through another person’s eyes, whether that be a formal or informal health provider or a patient,” he said. “This approach fundamentally relies on strong collaboration with Indian partners.”
The initiative’s teams will spend their weeks interviewing different health care providers and patients in a handful of Indian villages, taking copious notes and ultimately translating hundreds of interviews into findings.
Roshan Shankar, MS/MPP ’14, worked as part of the initiative’s team last summer, focusing on understanding pregnant women’s decisions about where to deliver their babies. After considering several summer internships with consulting firms and international organizations, Shankar declined these opportunities, instead opting to work with the Stanford India Health Policy Initiative.
Shankar is from New Delhi and has always planned to move back to his home country and work in government after school. He said the India Health Policy Initiative was a way to better understand his nation and the pressing challenges facing it.
“I’m used to sitting at a table and not venturing out,” Shankar said. “This experience showed me that things are much more different on the ground than on paper.”
After his work with the Stanford Health Policy Initiative, Shankar said he is now certain he wants to return to India and work in government.
“It was a humbling and enlightening experience. I think the way we did this entire analysis will affect the way I do any work there,” he said. “It will ensure that I do a more effective evaluation of the policies and programs that I work on, and start by going to see people who use them.”
The Stanford India Health Policy Initiative is supported by several organizations including the Center for Innovation in Global Health and the Office of International Affairs.
Teal Pennebaker is a freelance writer.
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Imagining Xi Jinping's China in 2023: Is a New Type of Great Power Relationship Possible Between the U.S. and China
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Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the Prime Ministership in 2013. As Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis. Australia's fiscal response to the crisis was reviewed by the IMF as the most effective stimulus strategy of all member states. Australia was the only major advanced economy not to go into recession. Mr. Rudd is also internationally recognized as one of the founders of the G20 which drove the global response to the crisis, and which in 2009 helped prevent the crisis from spiraling into a second global depression.
As Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Mr. Rudd was active in global and regional foreign policy leadership. He was a driving force in expanding the East Asia Summit to include both the US and Russia in 2010. He also initiated the concept of transforming the EAS into a wider Asia Pacific Community to help manage deep-routed tensions in Asia by building over time the institutions and culture of common security in Asia. On climate change, Mr. Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007 and legislated in 2008 for a 20% mandatory renewable energy target for Australia. Mr. Rudd launched Australia's challenge in the International Court of Justice with the object of stopping Japanese whaling in the Southern Ocean. Mr Rudd drove Australia’s successful bid for its current non-permanent seat on the United Nation’s Security Council and the near doubling of Australia's foreign aid budget.
Mr. Rudd remains engaged in a range of international challenges including global economic management, the rise of China, climate change and sustainable development. He is on the International Advisory Panel of Chatham House. He is a proficient speaker of Mandarin Chinese, a Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University and funded the establishment of the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He was a co-author of the recent report of the UN Secretary General's High Level Panel on Global Sustainability – “Resilient People, Resilient Planet" and chairs the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Fragile States. He also remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.
Bechtel Conference Center
Kevin Rudd
26th Prime Minister of Australia
Speaker
Conferences
2014 TEC Lectureship on Europe and the World with Adam Tooze, Yale University
The Europe Center invites you to the inaugural annual lectures of this series by Adam Tooze, Barton M. Briggs Professor of History, Yale University. On the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, Adam Tooze will deliver three lectures about the history of the transformation of the global power structure that followed from Imperial Germany’s decision to provoke America’s declaration of war in 1917. Tooze advances a powerful explanation of why the First World War rearranged political and economic structures across Eurasia and the British Empire, sowed the seeds of revolution in Russia and China, and laid the foundations of a new global order that began to revolve around the United States and the Pacific. These lectures will present an argument for why the fate of effectively the whole of civilization changed in 1917, and why the First World War’s legacy continues to shape our world today.
Titles and venues are listed below.
Wednesday, Apr 30, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Making Peace in Europe 1917-1919: Brest-Litovsk and Versailles”
Recent events in Ukraine pose the question, is a comprehensive peace for Europe, both East and West, possible? This lecture will address the first moment in which that question was posed, during and after World War I. In light of current events the lecture will focus on the influence of Russian power and powerlessness in shaping both the abortive effort to make peace in the East between Imperial Germany and Soviet Russia at Brest Litovsk - the first treaty to recognize the existence of an independent Ukraine - and the efforts to make peace in the West at Versailles and after. Returning to the period 1917-1923 suggests sobering conclusions about the stability of the order that we have taken for granted since 1991.
Thursday, May 1, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Koret Taube Room, Gunn-SIEPR
“Hegemony: Europe, America and the Problem of Financial Reconstruction, 1916-1933”
Having established itself in the 19th century as the financial center of the world, Europe's sudden impoverishment by World War I came as a dramatic shock. The ensuing trans-Atlantic crises of the 1920s and early 1930s were not only the most severe but the most consequential in the history of Europe and the wider world. But, to this day there is substantial disagreement amongst both social scientists and historians as to the causes of the disaster. Was it American leadership or a failure of cooperation that was to blame? This lecture will argue the case for a revised and historicized version of the hegemonic failure thesis. The absence presence of American influence was crucial in determining Europe's fate.
Friday, May 2, 2014, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm
Location: Bechtel Conference Center
Followed by a reeception, 5:30 pm - 6:15 pm
“Unsettled Lands: The Interwar Crisis of Agrarian Europe”
Until the middle of the twentieth century Europe, like the rest of the world, was majority agrarian. And yet the most influential accounts of the interwar crisis, framed as they were by the industrial and urban world of the later twentieth-century Europe, tended to ignore this evident fact, focusing instead on workers and business-men, politicians and soldiers. This lecture will illustrate how brining the peasantry back in has the potential not only to throw new light on Europe's great epoch of crisis, but to open that history, beyond the Bloodlands to the wider world.
Tooze is the author of The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (2006) and Statistics and the German State 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge (2001), among numerous other scholarly articles on modern European history.
April 30th and May 1st: Koret-Taube Conference Center in the Gunn–SIEPR Building (366 Galvez Street).
May 2nd: Bechtel Conference Center in Encina Hall (616 Serra Street).
Adam Tooze
Barton M. Briggs Professor of History
Speaker
Yale University
Lectures