Changes to the legal profession in the post-Mao years led to significant changes regarding courts and judicial autonomy that have been deeply intertwined with the stratification of living standards, dramatic growth of the Chinese legal profession, and emergence of significant income differentials for lawyers across urban localities, especially after 1992. This details these dynamics, which are consistent with this book’s ecological explanation of court reform, which posits that the structure and process of socio-legal forms have an interactive relationship; I also provide evidence in the second part of this chapter suggesting that these dynamics in the social forms of law influence the substance of law, for example, the decisions of court leaders in urban China to increase transparency of their courts and enhance the statutory basis of their judicial decisions. These developments also indicate expansions in judges’ overall decisional autonomy, as discussed in Chapter 1.

The strategic judicial responses to the Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS), detailed in the previous chapter, provide necessary context for understanding how the stratification of local markets for legal services in urban China can affect court reform and the decisional autonomy of judges. Variation in the development of the legal profession in different urban localities is the focus of this chapter, which also traces the major spatial and temporal shifts that have influenced lawyers’ career choices, and in turn, judicial designs in urban China. A spatially informed explanation of socio-legal processes and their structural effects begins with the higher salaries, standards, and status available to lawyers in “high-end” local legal service markets; the temporal analysis concentrates on how these dynamics were made possible by national recommitments to liberalizing reforms in the late twentieth century and then accelerated in the early twenty-first century.

This chapter bolsters the overall ecological theory of court reform by assessing an alternative explanation rooted primarily in top-down, state-centered logic – one assuming that leaders from the central CCP, state, or both have comprehensively determined the nature and extent of institutional change. One mechanism by which legal forms like judicial selection and promotion mechanisms could change in top-down fashion would be the central Party–State’s allocation of judicial personnel headcount (i.e., bianzhi) to local courts through the personnel management system. This chapter, however, presents evidence that this is not the case – despite differences in geography and development, court systems in Chengdu, Shenzhen, and Shanghai all demonstrated robust capabilities during the post-Mao era to expand and diversify their court and judicial structures, suggesting that top-down theories of court politics do not explain the local variation I describe in this book.