Over the past twenty-odd years, China has embarked on a somewhat determined path toward judicial transparency.1 Much of the progress came about during the first term of the Xi Administration, which has witnessed from 2013 to 2018 the rollout and revamp by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of three online platforms: for publication of Chinese court opinions, streaming of judicial proceedings, and disclosure of court judgments’ enforcement status.2 Though the implementation of these measures is far from satisfactory,3 the SPC continues to explore new possibilities of making Chinese courts more transparent. One recent highlight is the Provisions on the Publication of Judicial Process Information by People’s Courts on the Internet4 (the PJPI Provisions), under which the SPC officially started to contemplate making public, among other things, court filings.5
U.S. laws, the SPC noted, set a favorable example of public access to court filings.6 Indeed, American courts have a longstanding tradition of opening up judicial records to the general public, a tradition that was derived from and built upon their English common law heritage.7 Recent experiences prove that calls for a stronger right of access to court records are never old, and ever new. In 2019 alone, there have been a bipartisan congressional bill and a high-profile class action both seeking to remove fees for online access to federal court filings.8 A national news organization has also litigated before the federal circuit courts for years, most recently in 2018, asserting a constitutional right of access to filed complaints upon their immediate receipt by certain state courts.9 In public and academic discourses, proposals for greater judicial transparency, including better access to court filings, have appeared time and again.10
Inspired by these developments in the two countries, this Note investigates some of the U.S. policy considerations underpinning public access to court filings and argues that they are, in varying degrees, either compatible with or complementary to existing Chinese legal institutions concerning judicial transparency. To put the discussion in perspective, Part I briefly describes the reality of accessing court filings in China and the evolving U.S. public access regime. Part II does two things. First, it identifies two specific U.S. arguments favoring such access and finds that they make a somewhat appealing case in the Chinese legal context. Second, it responds to a concern shared by both systems, that increasing transparency might undermine the quality of judicial decisionmaking, and finds it wanting as to making court filings public in China. Part III examines certain U.S. justifications for the incidental privacy and reputational harms caused by disclosure of court filings. It suggests that the common thread of such justifications — that private interests should yield to certain significant public ones — can complement existing Chinese courts’ rationales for resolving the growing tension between judicial transparency and individuals’ need for secrecy. At bottom, this Note follows modern China’s century-old aspiration to “modernize” its legal system based on ideas from foreign law,11 mindful, nonetheless, of an important caveat: that this historical enterprise has merits today only if the foreign ideas found actually fit with China’s legal framework and can help solve problems arising thereunder.12
I. Synopses of Two Regimes
A. Public Access to Court Filings in China
Chinese court filings are generally restricted to the view of the parties to the case.13 Courts have described them as “internal litigation documents (内部诉讼文书)” for litigants’ (and courts’) eyes only.14 While there are no specific laws proscribing their publication,15 doing so on one’s own initiative risks civil liabilities. A case in point is Guan Lili v. Zhao Yao,16 where a criminal defense lawyer was held liable for defamation and privacy invasion for posting online his defense opinions made in an already-closed, openly tried case that involved the plaintiff’s husband.17 Although the court concluded that the statements were reasonably supported by openly challenged evidence, it nonetheless found that they contained information that discredited the plaintiff, and their nonconsensual disclosure had harmed her privacy and reputation.18 Not all the damages sought by the plaintiff were awarded though, presumably because the court realized that attorneys’ litigation-related statements are also protected under Chinese law.19
Despite Guan Lili, Chinese lawyers have not uncommonly circulated court filings to the media in order to check judicial abuses and pressure courts to reason better, especially in criminal cases.20 Indeed, the now- regularly published court decisions bring to light one vexing problem of Chinese courts: writing up thinly reasoned opinions that, among other things, accord only cursory, if any, attention to litigants’ submissions in court filings.21 A terse summary, if one is given at all, of each party’s factual and legal positions tends to be the order of the day, irking not only the losing party but also the winning one.22 Worse still, courts are sometimes too quick to dismiss complaints that are either meritorious to begin with or at least worthy of fuller explanations for dismissals.23 As early as 1999, the SPC noted that the quality of judicial reasoning had suffered from courts’ very failure to respond adequately to litigants’ arguments.24 Yet, despite steadfast institutional resolution to tackle this problem, little progress has been made since.
The PJPI Provisions provided for the first time for discretionary public disclosure by courts of parties’ filings — limited, for now, to complaints and answers, appeal briefs, and certain filed petitions — in “cases with major social impact (具有重大社会影响案件).”25 This modest exception to the general nondisclosure was put forward as a response to growing public interest in high-profile cases, and as a measure to improve public monitoring and social accountability of the judiciary, as well as to promote general understanding of the law.26 Yet the PJPI Provisions’ primary aim still is, the SPC emphasized, to “safeguard parties’ right to know adjudicatory matters (保障当事人对审判活动的知情权),”27 not that of the public. Until further deliberation, the SPC felt that it was not ready yet to make disclosure the norm.28 Notably, U.S. laws have been invoked as important reasons both for making Chinese court filings public and, more emphatically, for being circumspect in doing so.29 The tension between the public’s right to know and privacy protection is proffered by the SPC as one major source of its hesitation.30
B. Public Access to Court Filings in the United States
The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized a common law “presumption . . . in favor of public access to judicial records”31 — a public right of access “that predates the Constitution itself.”32 As a threshold matter, courts often decide whether a specific filing is presumptively public by asking whether it can be classified as a “judicial record,”33 for which varying, but mostly relaxed, standards have been employed.34 If this threshold is cleared, then the inquiry becomes whether there exist countervailing considerations for nondisclosure that can overcome the presumption for disclosure,35 a balancing exercise that the Supreme Court found “best left to the sound discretion of the trial court.”36 Heeding this call, the D.C. Circuit, for example, has identified six factors to rein in lower courts’ discretion, with the starting point being a “strong presumption” favoring public access.37 Some circuits have taken an even more protective view of this common law right of access, allowing sealings of court filings only when they are “narrow[ly] tailor[ed]” to serve “compelling” confidentiality interests,38 a standard reminiscent of that more often used to protect constitutional rights.
Indeed, many courts have held that the First Amendment also gives rise to a presumption of public access to court records. While the Supreme Court’s view so far is that the amendment grants the public a right of access only to criminal trials,39 “the federal courts of appeals have widely agreed that [such right] extends to civil [judicial] . . . records.”40 A two-pronged approach, the “tests of experience and logic,”41 has been used to determine whether the First Amendment right of access applies to a particular court filing: under the experience prong, whether the document “ha[s] historically been open to the press and general public,”42 and then, under the logic prong, whether “public access plays a significant positive role in the functioning of the particular process in question.”43 Court filings that meet both prongs are presumptively public, and such “presumption may be overcome only by an overriding interest based on findings that closure is essential to preserve higher values and is narrowly tailored to serve that interest.”44 However, applying this test to court filings is not universally followed; some courts have sidestepped the First Amendment inquiry altogether and applied only the common law test.45
So much for the legal doctrines. The U.S. public’s right of access to judicial records became everyday reality only in the 1990s when people no longer had to “queue up at the counter and mark the papers [they] wanted copied” at the courthouse.46 With respect to federal courts, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) system, instituted nationwide in 1990,47 allows the public to remotely view court filings of “all district, bankruptcy, and appellate courts . . . immediately after they have been electronically filed.”48 The now-general requirement that litigants before the federal judiciary must file electronically49 speaks to the volume of information one can obtain 24/7 from PACER with an easily registered account and for a small fee.50 The state courts, while lacking an as-comprehensive online database, have also generally provided electronic access to their filings.51 In this sense, then, the scope of the U.S. public’s right of access is not so much delineated by the law as by the technology that lifts the geographical and temporal barriers to accessing information.
II. Public Access and Judicial Decisionmaking
So what are the U.S. arguments for relatively unfettered access to court filings? And how would they fare in China? This Part looks into these questions and suggests that at least two U.S. arguments are agreeable to the Chinese judiciary and public, measured by existing Chinese legal rules and enduring institutional goals. It also responds to a twist, as reflected in both Chinese and U.S. judicial theories and practices: for purposes of optimal judicial decisionmaking, transparency is not an unqualified good and some secrecy is imperative. This Part briefly explains why this principle should not concern Chinese policymakers when assessing the desirability of making court filings public. The primary goal here is not so much to canvass all the arguments for public access to court filings in China as to sketch, in a comparative light, some of the relevant considerations of judicial transparency that might be shared by two otherwise very different legal systems.
A. How Would the U.S. Arguments Fare in China?
From U.S. case law, one can distill two specific, recurrent arguments favoring public access to court filings that may be relatable to China. First, disclosure functions as a monitoring mechanism that allows the public to understand and assess judicial decisions.52 The idea is that the public, in addition to knowing the case outcomes, should be able to ask: Why and how did courts arrive at these conclusions? Should they?53 To this end, U.S. courts have generally agreed that filings that are in fact relied upon in adjudications (say, pleadings) are presumptively public; so too are those that “would reasonably have the tendency to influence” judges’ decisions (say, evidentiary motions).54 In many ways, public examination of the bases of court rulings can be seen as emanating from a profound liberal view that judges are tasked with providing reasons in a constitutional democracy and should, by implication, make their reasons transparent for accountability purposes.55
The second U.S. argument for making court filings public is that they reveal information on matters of public concern.56 It overlaps with the monitoring argument to the extent that what is being revealed is the basis of judicial decisionmaking. Yet, even where no merits decisions have been rendered, the public is still found to have a legitimate interest in knowing, for example, “the prevalence of certain types of cases, the nature of the parties to particular kinds of actions, information about the settlement rates in different areas of law, and the types of materials that are likely to be sealed.”57 This knowledge interest rests upon the idea that litigation, even among private parties, is more than just private dealings, because “state power has been invoked” and “public resources spent.”58 The normative and rhetorical force of this logic is reinforced by the fact that significant social and political issues are often channeled to the courts.
On Chinese legal terrain, one would not sound foreign in making the monitoring argument.59 For one thing, it responds well to the reality that Chinese courts often fail to take litigants’ arguments seriously, which is contrary to long-running top-down mandates from the SPC.60 While the reasons for this gap are complicated,61 disclosure of court filings at least gives the public — informed by the media and legal community — a role in monitoring the compliance of these mandates, whose enforcement has so far relied solely on Chinese courts’ self-discipline. In reality, self-interest seems to have taken over instead, as shown by a perverse effect of requiring Chinese courts to publish only their opinions: many judges, instead of writing better-reasoned opinions, have offered even less reasoning to evade exposure of the decisions’ potential weaknesses.62 (Contemporaneous) disclosure of the inputs of decisions could at least make it marginally more difficult for judges to be evasive. Lawyers might, in turn, have more incentives (and pressure) to be persuasive in their filings.63
In addition, this U.S. monitoring idea — that materials influencing court decisions should be subject to public scrutiny — is compatible with existing Chinese legal rules and practices. Starting in 2016, livestreams of judicial proceedings in China became available online, where the public can actually watch litigants literally read out their filings in open courts.64 Meanwhile, a faithful summary of litigants’ submissions has been, for years, a required component of Chinese judicial opinions.65 Not to mention Chinese lawyers, seeking the aid of public opinion, often disclose court filings on their own in high-profile cases.66 The upshot is that making these documents public records shouldn’t really be that drastic of a change under the current Chinese legal regime.
Turning, then, to the information-revealing argument, that court filings should be disclosed because they contain information on matters of public concern, one might, at first glance, find it a bit out of touch with the institutional reality of Chinese courts. For starters, many of these courts have deliberately avoided adjudicating, or even taking, impactful cases out of political stability concerns.67 Private mediation is still courts’ much preferred option, where judges can more easily persuade, or “soft[ly] coerc[e],” disgruntled litigants to settle.68 Publicity of lawsuits, which might cause parties to litigate with greater intransigence69 or bring unwanted populist pressure upon courts, could then become a big headache for the conflict-avoiding Chinese judges. More to the point, the information-sharing rhetoric of this argument would alarm the distinctly bureaucratic Chinese judiciary.70 For decades, it has been classifying under vague standards a slew of judicial documents and information, a tradition that has now created a strong bureaucratic mindset against publicizing even nonclassified judicial materials.71
But still, there remains much ground for appealing to a public right to know about lawsuits in China. In 2013, the SPC, when explaining why the public should access court opinions over litigants’ objections based on privacy concerns, argued precisely that because litigation invokes “state power (公权力)” and spends “public judicial resources (司法公共资源),” it ceases to be a private process.72 Whether reflecting a genuine normative belief or a mere rhetorical strategy of the SPC, this argument, which resonates with the U.S. information-revealing argument, should be extended to support public access to Chinese court filings. Moreover, despite trying to push off controversial cases, Chinese courts are already dealing with public law cases on a regular basis — the prime example being “administrative litigation” where private parties sue governments for official abuses in legislating and implementing laws.73 At least in these cases, the social need for disclosing court filings is justified, for the plaintiffs, usually the worse off, unwarrantedly lose too often, and many of them have been forced to withdraw complaints.74 Indeed, as Professors Xin He and Kwai Ng observed, “[f]or the protesters-cum-litigants, the Chinese courtroom has become a public space in which the resistant voices and practices of lay people can be expressed.”75
In the end, since more judicial transparency, the SPC acknowledged, would expose more flaws in the judiciary,76 the public demand for even more transparency combined with the increasing social significance of litigation, would likely make the public-monitoring and information-revealing arguments mutually reinforcing in China.
B. Response to the Imperative of Judicial Secrecy
The usual, and justified, reaction to a call for greater judicial transparency is that it must be tempered with protection of nonjudicial interests, such as privacy and proprietary information.77 This is of course true in the case of court filings.78 This section, however, takes up a point less often stressed: transparency imposes costs on judicial decisionmaking itself, whose optimal functioning requires some secrecy. As Professor Frederick Schauer duly observes, a more transparent judiciary, while useful to disinfect a few more bad decisions (echoing Justice Brandeis79), may also impede a few more good decisions that would have been made more easily in darkness than in sunlight.80
This tradeoff notwithstanding, whether to adopt a cost-benefit approach to judicial transparency — increasing transparency only if the incremental benefits to decisionmaking outweigh its costs — or a lopsided approach — maximizing (or minimizing) only benefits (or costs) at the expense of suboptimal decisionmaking — largely depends on the existing level of public trust in the judiciary itself.81 The Chinese and U.S. judiciaries apparently differ in this respect, but they still agree upon the basic point: that a full-scale public access to judicial records is undesirable for quality decisionmaking. Take U.S. federal judges’ working papers. Despite containing documents such as draft opinions and bench memos that are produced during public service and highly informative of final, published decisions, they are not subject to the presumption of public access; instead, judges disclose them at their pleasure.82 The principal affirmative justification for this practice is that secrecy facilitates informed collective decisionmaking by allowing a candid, thorough exchange of alternative views.83 In the early 2000s in China, this animated the primary objection to publicizing nonmajority opinions: many worried that without the shield of secrecy, Chinese judges wouldn’t even feel safe to take unpopular positions.84
Whatever the force of this deliberation-liberating or -protecting justification in these contexts, it should in theory function as a limiting principle to the public-monitoring and information-revealing arguments. But the point here is that, it would seem all but hyperbolic to argue that public access to court filings in China might somehow impede the quality of judicial decisionmaking. The precise reason is that even with this additional transparency, the Chinese judiciary is still shrouded in ample, if not excessive, secrecy necessary to produce “desirable” decisions as easily as it does now. Many outcome-determinative case files have traditionally and continuously been hidden from litigants, much less the public.85 Behind-the-scenes exchanges between judges and their superiors regarding how to decide pending cases are also a longstanding institutional custom.86 More fundamental, the sunlight measures of the Chinese judiciary have so far omitted a reliable public enforcement mechanism: none other than a right to sue when public court records are unlawfully withheld. It thus seems unlikely that there would be too much self-imposed transparency by the judiciary. Instead, it is more likely that disclosure of court filings, if implemented, would be highly restrained and, at times, arbitrarily selective.87
III. Public Access and Private Harms
What is a real possibility, however, is that court filings would be “used to gratify private spite or promote public scandal” or “serve as reservoirs of libelous statements for press consumption.”88 The response of the U.S. legal system is to have courts “weigh the need for secrecy against the public’s right of access,”89 accomplished often through a multifactor balancing test.90 Certain judicial records are also sealed in general, and presumptively public ones can be redacted before their releases.91 For now, China needs to deal with only published court opinions, and its solution to privacy concerns is similarly to excise certain personal identifiers from the opinions before their publication on the SPC-managed platform.92 Parties to the case who disclose litigation documents and leak such sensitive information could incur civil liabilities.93
But to the extent that public disclosure of court filings is desirable, these measures can only allay but not avert privacy and reputational harms. This Part’s interest, then, is in the justifications for these incidental burdens on individuals. In America, of particular relevance are the policies underlying two common law rules: First, the “fair report privilege” that immunizes a publisher’s report of libelous court filings from defamation liability if the account is “accurate and complete or a fair abridgement.”94 Second, the “litigation privilege” that further immunizes litigants and attorneys from liability for “words or writings used in the course of [judicial] proceedings reflecting injuriously upon others,” as long as such statements are “material and pertinent” to the disputes.95 Understanding why these rules make sense, this Part argues, can helpfully complement the existing Chinese judicial approach to applying functionally equivalent Chinese rules to resolve China’s growing tension between judicial transparency and individuals’ need for secrecy.
A. Justifications for the Fair Report Privilege
U.S. courts have advanced two principal theories to justify the fair report privilege. The first one is the “public information theory,” positing “that no risk should be imposed on those who bring important public information forward.”96 In reporting judicial proceedings, the press brings forward important public information to citizens who are legally entitled to, but practically cannot, observe those proceedings.97 The second theory, an “analogue” to the first one, is the “public supervision” theory that holds press publicity also helps public oversight of judicial (mis)conduct.98 Essentially, these two theories are a special case of the familiar principle that private interests must be outweighed by paramount public interests. Here, it is more important to secure the public’s right to know and monitor judicial operations than to safeguard individuals’ privacies and reputations.99
The harder questions are how far this general justification can go and whether and where to draw a line. In reality, deep, irreparable private harms may result from buzz-driven but otherwise privileged news reports of scurrilous allegations that are intentionally filed and then dropped before their veracity is challenged in open courts.100 Motivated by this concern, the U.S. common law rule used to be that the fair report privilege did not apply to reports of initial, ex parte pleadings or other filings that have received no judicial action.101 But now, this limitation is generally obsolete.102 Courts have offered several rationales for this extension of the privilege: first, a policy judgment that public interest in the judicial system begins with these initial filings;103 second, an empirical observation that the public is capable of telling accusation from proof;104 and third, a practical consideration that one-sided party filings wouldn’t be any less defamatory simply because they have been acted upon in some judicial form.105
B. Justifications for the Litigation Privilege
Since protecting fair and accurate press coverage of damaging court filings already takes a toll on individuals’ privacy and reputation interests, why does U.S. law further protect litigants and lawyers for initially making these filings under the litigation privilege? There exist at least three major policy justifications. For starters, such a privilege “afford[s] litigants . . . the utmost freedom of access to the courts without fear of being harassed subsequently by derivative tort actions.”106 Additionally, it facilitates courts’ “truth-seeking” process by allowing unobstructed inquiries among parties and judges.107 Third, and relatedly, it enables lawyers to “speak freely to zealously represent their clients without fear of reprisal or financial hazard,”108 despite the risk that a “shady practitioner” would occasionally be protected.109 Serving these values, the litigation privilege is aptly revered as being “indispensable to the due administration of justice.”110
Still, that this privilege plus the fair report privilege might leave a defamed party remediless for harms caused by publication of court filings has not been lost on U.S. courts. As the Second Circuit recently lamented, “[s]hielded by the ‘litigation privilege,’ bad actors can defame opponents in court pleadings . . . without fear of lawsuit and liability.”111 The court thus “urge[d] the media to exercise restraint in covering potentially defamatory allegations,”112 “caution[ed] the public to read such accounts with discernment,”113 and mobilized “common law courts to revitalize [the] crucial qualification to the litigation privilege,” that is, the qualification that the privilege attaches only to statements that are material and pertinent to the litigation.114 Nevertheless, as the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania reasoned over a century ago, under the litigation privilege, “[w]rong may at times be done to a defamed party, but it is damnum absque injuria. The inconvenience of the individual must yield to a rule for the good of the general public.”115
C. A Useful Complement to China
A central theme of the justifications for the fair report privilege and litigation privilege is that some important public interests, such as monitoring the judiciary and ensuring its proper functioning, are worth the incidental private injuries to individuals. This idea can be a useful addition to the current Chinese judicial conception on the tension between disclosure of judicial records and protection of privacy and reputation.
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Chinese courts rarely advert to the public interests that may be at stake in cases featuring such tension. Where the media reports court records and then is sued for defamation or invading privacy, many Chinese courts appear to conceptualize such publication as concerning only the immediate litigants.116 The result is that even where the media prevails, the win seems equivocal on policy grounds, as the courts often express discomfort about sanctioning private harms flowing from an act that is perceived to be advancing only private interests.117 Thus, in a recent decision holding that a media company’s provision of an online search tool for court opinions had not harmed plaintiff’s reputation and privacy, the court nonetheless admonished the company to remove personal information already contained in these opinions in order to “avoid unnecessary litigations (避免不必要的纠纷).”118
Failure to justify disclosure on public interest grounds would be more consequential in cases where litigants or lawyers are sued for making allegedly libelous yet litigation-related statements in court filings. The logic of many Chinese courts in ruling for these defendants is that the challenged filings, such as civil answers, have not been widely circulated but are privy only to the parties (and the courts), and so the alleged disclosure harms are presumably minimal.119 What is unaddressed, however, is that even if these filings got out, why such “harms,” if any, should not be outweighed by public interest in, say, judicial transparency and zealous attorney advocacy. It could be that Guan Lili v. Zhao Yao, discussed in Part I, is many Chinese courts’ contemplated answer: privacy or libel liabilities would be assessed in this scenario, but, to account for defendants’ advocacy interests, they would be lesser than what the plaintiffs are suing for.120 The degree of the publicity of the alleged defamatory filings would then effectively become the metric against which judicial relief is meted out — the more publicized such filings are, the more severe the liabilities imposed.
There is, however, a better alternative to adjudicating such cases: a few Chinese courts have begun to rely on more public-oriented rationales that are similar to, though still less developed than, those of the litigation privilege and the fair report privilege. For example, in a 2018 case where the defendant was sued for allegedly filing a libelous civil answer,121 the Beijing No.2 Intermediate Court held that the answer did not harm plaintiff’s reputation not because, as the lower Beijing Xicheng District Court argued, it was made known only to the litigants, but because the public should not equate allegations to court-verified truth even if the answer was publicized.122 Only two years earlier, this contrast of reasoning had featured a factually similar case decided also by Beijing courts, though the outcome was reversed.123 There, the lower court employed the above logic of the No.2 Intermediate Court to find for the defendant, reasoning further that litigants being able to argue freely in courts should justify the reputation risks to their adversaries.124 But, on appeal, it was the publicity-focused logic of the Xicheng District Court that had carried the day.125 As to the press, the Chenzhou Intermediate Court in recently explaining why, under a 1993 SPC rule, the press cannot be subject to libel liabilities unless the reporting is grossly inaccurate,126 emphasized particularly its responsibility for securing “the public’s right to know (大众知情权).”127 The challenged coverage of court opinions was thus held not libelous despite being slightly off.128
To some extent, the split-the-differences approach adopted in Guan Lili and suggested by other cases reflects the traditional “middle way” policy of many Chinese courts.129 But, as the above cases reveal, there exists institutional space for accommodating a more public-trumps-private approach. And that is why the justifications for the two U.S. rules might be useful: they can complement Chinese courts’ understanding of many functionally equivalent Chinese rules bearing on the tension between disclosure of judicial records and individuals’ need for secrecy. Indeed, besides the 1993 SPC rule previously mentioned, the SPC has provided since 1998 that objective and accurate media coverage of official records is free from defamation liabilities.130 The plain text of a 2014 SPC rule also indicates that republication of otherwise private or damaging information from public court records should be immune from civil liabilities.131 And in Guan Lili, one wonders why China’s Lawyers Law, which was amended in 2007 to explicitly grant lawyers immunity for words spoken in courts,132 did not even appear in the four corners of an opinion issued in 2014.133 Now that the SPC is considering granting public access to court filings, it should of course be cautious about any reputational and privacy implications, but, as shown by many Chinese lower courts’ rulings, it is more important to foreground the public interest underpinnings of such access when designing the relevant substantive rules. The U.S. ideas might, then, be worth a thought.
Conclusion
The SPC has suggested that making court filings public in China is only a matter of time, but one needs to bear in mind that it took China fifteen years to publish, at the national level, (most) court opinions after one regional court first experimented in 1999.134 Time would be well spent, though, if the Chinese judiciary can think through the relevant pros and cons of public access to court filings and how it should adjudicate concrete disputes arising out of their disclosure. U.S. laws, to the extent they are consulted, can provide some not-so-foreign inputs into this process, including how this access might interact with judicial decisionmaking and cut back certain private interests. Needless to say, specifics of the access and nonaccess rules governing Chinese court filings should — and will — be left only to the Chinese.135 Indeed, that this whole comparative law enterprise is a practical pursuit may be due chiefly to the fact that judicial transparency is a relatively non-Western, ideologically neutral value that does not conflict with the political needs of the Chinese authorities. Rather, it fits their goals to enhance, in a technocratic fashion, courts’ professionalism, accountability, and institutional legitimacy, but not necessarily to afford them more independence.136 It is not yet clear how much net benefit this approach can yield, but there is hope that a more transparent Chinese judiciary will be on the positive side of the ledger.