Reconsidering the Chinese Landscape of Procedural Justice in Civil Cases: Procedural Aims,Systematic Framework and the Development in Digital Era

Civil procedural justice is deemed as a fundamental aspect of modern rule of law and should serve as one core guiding idea for judicial practice and legal research.Although procedural justice originally stems from Western legal traditions,from a conceptual perspective,civil procedural justice should still be regarded as an iconic concept of China's procedural rule of law.From an external perspective,the understanding of civil procedural justice depends on the guidance of the normative purposes and functions of civil litigation.Based on multiple possible theoretical choices,a distinctive pluralistic procedural teleology,shaped by China's local knowledge system,should be constructed.From an internal perspective,within China's constitutional implementation framework emphasizing fundamental rights protection,civil procedural justice possesses a local theory and institutional practice capable of dialogue with Western rule of law experiences,manifesting as a multi-layered autonomous conception of procedural justice.From a reality-oriented perspective,the application of judicial artificial intelligence in the digital-intelligent era is developing rapidly,and its impact on traditional civil procedural justice presents both changing and unchanging aspects.It is necessary to anticipate the advanced applications of AI judges and refine our understanding of the auxiliary adjudication principle.