Professor Dr. DING Chunyan (City University of Hong Kong): A Legal Innovation to Enhance Governance through Litigation: The Dual-Track Public Interest Litigation in China

Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law

  • Date: Feb 10, 2023
  • Time: 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
  • Location: Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law
About the speaker:
DING Chunyan is the Associate Dean and Associate Professor at the School of Law of the City University of Hong Kong. She obtained LLB and LLM at Peking University, an LLM at University College London, and her PhD at the University of Hong Kong. She became a qualified PRC lawyer in 2001. Before joining CityU, she was a Fulbright research fellow at Harvard Law School, where she conducted research on comparative health law and tort law in 2008-09. Her primary areas of research and teaching include tort law, medical law, and Chinese and comparative civil law. She has authored Medical Negligence Law in Transitional China (2012) and published over forty journal articles and book chapters in her research fields.

About the topic:
To protect the public interest and enhance governance through litigation, the central government of China has adopted a legal innovation called "public interest litigation" nationwide since July 2017. Under the dual-track public interest litigation system operating in China, both the authorised non-governmental organisations as private actors and procuratorial organs as public actors have standing to file public interest litigation against a private defendant in civil proceedings, while only procuratorial organs are empowered to sue the delinquent administrative agencies in administrative public interest litigation. This lecture discusses the socio-political reasons for the rise of the Chinese public interest litigation system, examines the feature of the system in operation, and analyses the functions and limitations of the system in terms of enhancing governance through litigation in China's context.

About the Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law:
The “Hamburg Lecture Series on Chinese Law” was established in 2002 as a series of guest lectures from notable legal scholars and legal practitioners, who engage in research stays at the Hamburg Institute. It aims to provide insight into legal fields under development in the People’s Republic of China and which are thus attracting great international interest.
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