Making China’s Apex Court (1928-1948): Legal History as viewed from Newly Opened Diaries

Abstract

This article aimed to contribute to the global conversation on consequential courts by examining the history of the Judicial Yuan, China’s apex court from the 1920s to the 1940s, in terms of how it was viewed in diary entries by Chiang Kai-shek, the predominant political leader, by Ju Zheng, the President of the Judicial Yuan, and by Xie Guansheng, the Minister of Judicial Administration. This article is the first to engage with the diaries of these political and judicial leaders at the highest level to explore key aspects of the legal history of the Republic of China. This article focused on the structural and functional evolution of the Judicial Yuan that resulted from the informal daily interactions between the judicial leaders and the leading political figure in China between 1928 and 1948. It is contended that these interactions not only affected the development path but also substantively reshaped the structure and power of the Judicial Yuan. Chiang’s personal deference to the President of Judicial Yuan’s legal expertise in constitutional designing helped smooth the integration of a bigger national apex court into the newly formed central government system. The later more dramatic interactions between Ju Zheng and Chiang created one driving force for the China’s national apex= court to survive through the extremely turbulent times during the 1930s and the 1940s.As a result, these two decades of changes in China’s apex court brought about a degree of creative institutionalization that laid a further basis for Chinese legal exceptionalism.