On May 16, two leading scholars in the field of law, Professor Benjamin L. Liebman and Professor Rachel Stern, were invited to speak at a public lecture titled “Big Data and Future of Litigation.” Columbia Global Centers | Beijing and AmCham China co-hosted the event.
Professor Liebman is the Robert L. Lieff Professor of Law at Columbia University. He also serves as the director of Center for Chinese Legal Studies at Columbia Law School and the Chair of Faculty Steering Committee at Columbia Global Centers | Beijing. Professor Rachel Stern is the assistant professor of Law and Political Science at Berkeley Law.
Over the past three years Chinese courts have posted more than 29 million court judgments online. This mass release of court data is changing how courts judge cases as well as how litigants and lawyers navigate the legal system. "If there is a new question or even a question where judges are a little uncertain, they are going to look at this data set," said Professor Liebman. "For example, Haidian District People's Court in Beijing is known for having a lot of IP cases, so judges are much more likely to look at the Beijing court for their IP cases rather than to look at them at courts elsewhere."
Professor Liebman's research focuses on Chinese courts, Chinese tort law, Chinese criminal procedure, and the impact of popular opinion and populism on the Chinese legal system. Prior to joining the Law School’s faculty in 2002, Liebman was an associate in the London and Beijing offices of Sullivan & Cromwell. He also previously served as a law clerk to Justice David Souter and to Judge Sandra Lynch of the First Circuit. His recent publications include Regulating the Visible Hand: The Institutional Implications of Chinese State Capitalism, with Curtis J. Milhaupt, Oxford University Press, 2015, and Leniency in Chinese Criminal Law: Everyday Justice in Henan, Berkeley Journal of International Law, 2015.