Huabing Li

What if you could go through an entire lawsuit online, without leaving home? After China set up internet courts in Hangzhou, Beijing, and Guangzhou, more people took their disputes to court, many of them one-off litigants arguing their own cases. Defendants, too, were more likely to turn up and to have a lawyer, and there is no sign that judgments got worse.

Generative AI promises legal help to anyone who can type a question, yet lawyers may gain even more from it, because they know what to ask. This paper tests in an experiment whether AI narrows or widens the gap between laypeople and legal professionals, using tasks that cannot simply be pasted into a chatbot.

Hidden fees and endless product suggestions push online shoppers into choices they would not otherwise make, but what do they actually cost? In an experiment in a mock online store where both money and time run short, this paper measures how much these two tricks take from shoppers, in money and in time, and whether more vulnerable shoppers lose more.

When does misusing someone’s personal information become a harm worth paying for? In Chinese courts, it depends on who sues. Individuals are paid at the judge’s discretion, while public-interest suits set damages by what the infringer gained.

When an AI tool gives a lawyer or a client wrong legal advice, who should pay? AI providers write almost all liability out of their terms of use, and under a fault-based rule they could pass off preventable errors as unavoidable hallucinations. This paper argues that they should instead be strictly liable, with a defence for careless users, and that the EU’s revised Product Liability Directive can already be read this way.

This paper is still being drafted, so its findings remain under seal. It takes an empirical look at how China has been building its digital courts across the country. The rest will be heard once the case is ready for trial.

Must punishment that fits the crime cost us deterrence? After China softened its harsh sentences for embezzlement and bribery in 2016, the number of these crimes rose, but the rise came almost entirely from minor offences, and offenders had less reason to escalate to serious ones. Proportionate punishment and deterrence turn out to go together.

Does a temple nearby make a thief hold back? Matching hundreds of thousands of theft cases in China with the locations of Buddhist temples and Taoist shrines nationwide, this paper finds that thefts committed closer to religious sites, or where such sites are more common, are less severe, and that this effect weakens in more developed regions.