High-End Demand: The Legal Profession as a Source of Judicial Selection Reform in Urban China

Most studies of comparative judicial politics suggest that judicial autonomy emerges from democratic competition, but despite its authoritarian political system, China has introduced reforms that increase merit-based competition, transparency, and modest professional autonomy in local courts. Variations in judicial selection procedures across urban China reflect differences in local markets for professional legal services: when mid-ranking judges can easily find lucrative local employment as lawyers, court leaders strategically reform appointment and promotion mechanisms to retain these young, but experienced, judges. These findings are based on nearly fifteen months of in-country fieldwork, conducted between 2012 and 2014, including forty-nine interviews with judges across three different cities: Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Chengdu. Employing the subnational comparative method, this article not only builds theory regarding the legal profession's role in authoritarian states, but also offers new empirical detail regarding the selection, performance evaluation, and behavior of judges in urban China.