Transparency

ROLLING BACK TRANSPARENCY IN CHINA’S COURTS

Benjamin Liebman,* Rachel Stern,** Xiaohan Wu *** & Margaret Roberts ****

Despite a burgeoning conversation about the centrality of information management to governments, scholars are only just beginning to address the role of legal information in sustaining authoritarian rule. This Essay presents a case study showing how legal information can be manipulated: through the deletion of previously published cases from China’s online public database of court decisions. Using our own dataset of all 42 million cases made...