The Dual Tales of Moralizing Courts: Examining Party-Related Moralizing Keywords in Civil Judgments

Eva Gao — 2025-03-14

Combining Rule of Virtue with Rule of Law, a policy initiative in China that could be traced back to the governance of President Jiang Zemin, has drawn widespread attention from Western scholarship over the past few years. But how is this initiative carried out in everyday judicial decisions? The first part of this article tries to answer this question by searching for a group of 18 morality-related and Party-sanctioned keywords in publicly issued civil cases between 2001 and 2018. Here, we found judicial decisions incorporating extra-legal moralizing passages across a wide range of locations, court levels, subject matters, and individual judges. These judicial opinions include moralizing lectures on various topics and in various styles; and we further analyze their rhetoric and function through a close reading of over 1,500 sample cases. The second part of this article then examines whether this judicial practice accurately reflects the top-down policy initiative and seeks to explain the identified gaps by offering a second, bottom-up motivation for judicial moralizing. In conclusion, we posit that Chinese judges include Party-sanctioned moralizing language in their opinions to serve dual purposes: both to satisfy a political mission imposed from the top, and to win over populist trust and support on their own accord. We end with an analysis of the legal and structural implications of such practices, and a cautionary note about their potential impact on the legitimacy of the Chinese judicial system.

Columbia Journal of Asian Law

The Dual Tales of Moralizing Courts: Examining Party-Related Moralizing Keywords in Civil Judgments