How does justice win trust and respect

Justice is the last barrier of social fairness and justice. With the rapid development of economy and society today, in the face of political democratization and social transformation, the public's expectations for fair justice and effective rights relief are increasing day by day. However, due to factors such as judicial independence, imperfect litigation procedures, judicial corruption from time to time, and insufficient reasoning in judgment documents, public opinion and judicial relations in individual cases are tense, and judicial credibility is not optimistic. From a macro perspective, in order to win the trust and respect of the public, the judiciary must work hard from the following three aspects: public opinion and the judiciary must communicate effectively. Since China entered the network era, typical cases in the criminal justice field have often become the focus of public attention. Since this year, Deng Yujiao's case, Hangzhou's car racing case and Sun Weiming's drunk driving case have tested the credibility of the judiciary in the turbulent public opinion. It is generally believed that public opinion reflects the common sense rationality of the public, and judgment reflects the professional rationality of judges. In a mature society ruled by law, public opinion has sufficient space for free expression, and the judiciary will uphold its independent character and will not be arbitrarily influenced by public opinion. At the same time, the rational participation and reasonable supervision of public opinion is also one of the AIDS for the judiciary to win the trust of the people, thus getting rid of power control and becoming truly independent. However, the ideal prospect of benign interaction between public opinion and judicature depends on the support of the system. Whether or not to establish a communication mechanism that effectively combines the process of judicial reasoning with public opinion out of court is the key for the judiciary to respect public opinion and not be held hostage by it. As far as the communication mechanism between public opinion and judicature is concerned, public participation in the trial, openness and transparency of the trial procedure and enhancement of the rationality of the judgment are feasible and concrete paths to enhance the judicial credibility. First of all, through the people's participation in the trial, let the people share the judicial power, supervise the judges throughout the process, and let the people be the masters of the country deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. In this way, the suspects of judges' corruption, arbitrariness and power interference will be reduced. Moreover, in the process of participating in the trial, judges should communicate with the public in a language that is common sense, rational and understandable by ordinary people, which reduces the people's sense of alienation from the judiciary, prevents judges from unconsciously forming professional arrogance and prejudice, and makes the judgment more correct. In addition, the participation system can also play the role of rule of law education. Because people participate in the actual trial of a case and are personally present, it is easy to realize the difficulty of "settling disputes and stopping disputes", and they will leave a deep and intuitive impression on the content of the law and the judicial process. This kind of judicial experience is of great benefit to enhance their sense of reverence for the law and even public power and their sense of identity in execution. It is far better than abstract legal preaching and has laid a solid foundation for the rule of law invisibly. Secondly, the open and transparent mechanism of court trial is the institutional guarantee for accepting the public opinion test and public opinion supervision. Only by allowing the media to fully report the trial process and trial results, making the judge's adjudication process public in the society, accepting extensive and in-depth supervision, and giving the public the right to read papers and know, can we effectively resist interference and corrosion. In this regard, in recent years, some courts have tried trials such as live TV trials and online judgments, which are worth popularizing and learning. Finally, strengthening the rationality of judgment is the final channel between justice and public opinion. In the reality that judicial judgments are generally irrational, it is imperative to reform the method of making judgments, change the "sloppy" judgment that simply corresponds the facts of the case with the legal provisions, and replace it with a judgment with clear jurisprudence, careful logic, detailed evidence and thorough reasoning; Change the stereotyped "stereotyped writing" judgment. Replace the "stereotyped writing" judgment with a judgment with particularity that varies from case to case, jurisprudence that highlights the judge's personality and is both reasonable and reasonable. In this way, the judgment can be accepted and respected by the public, and it can truly become a judicial carrier that highlights public order and good customs, declares fairness and justice, and transmits justice to the society. To balance substantive justice and procedural justice, China's traditional judicial cognitive thinking focuses on facts and takes finding out the facts as its own responsibility. If this concept of substantive justice develops to the extreme, it will be at the expense of the predictability and stability of the law, which may lead to the protracted litigation and cases of the parties. Of course, courts in western countries should determine facts and judge cases according to evidence, but the concept of facts they emphasize mainly refers to the persuasiveness of evidence, but the evidence is not necessarily objective and true. The basis of judge's judgment is reliable evidence guaranteed by various judicial expertise techniques, procedural elements and rules of burden of proof. Under the guidance of this view of procedural justice, the court has no obligation to exhaust all means to pursue the truth. Two different views of judicial justice make the judiciary have different reactions in the face of public opinion and public opinion. Chinese-style trial is based on the ultimate pursuit of objective truth, which needs to consider the social effects of specific situations and judgments, while rigid legal norms need to refer to moral judgments and citizen purification outside the law in order to obtain the basis of public opinion. To make matters more complicated, the cognition and understanding of ordinary people in China are deeply influenced by Hollywood court dramas and China Bao Qingtian series. Under the influence of "TV drama" judicature, people's imagination of judicature hovers between the two extremes of substantive justice and procedural justice, which is a wishful expectation that no realistic judicial system can meet at the same time. At the same time, in order to satisfy this wishful thinking, expectations are too high, and trust is naturally difficult to establish. To solve the above judicial problems, the feasible way of thinking is to seek the harmony between substantive justice and procedural justice, and * * * * will win. After all, the process of judicial reasoning should be serious, and the collection, screening and judgment of probative force of evidence must be carried out in strict accordance with the procedural rules. Only in this way can the predictability and certainty of the law be reliably guaranteed and the substantive justice have a solid foundation. However, procedural justice should not be overemphasized. Careful, rigid and even divorced from social reality is not conducive to the realization of substantive justice. Therefore, attention should be paid to listening to and even absorbing the opinions of the masses, and the value of people's participation in the trial outside the court should be infiltrated through the rational channels of the people as the yardstick for exercising judicial discretion, so that the judgment results can achieve the harmonious unity of legal and social effects. When judicial specialization and judicial democratization go hand in hand, the improvement of judicial credibility depends on the fairness and transparency of the judicial process, as well as the quality and acceptability of judicial decisions. As far as the quality of judicial decisions is concerned, judicial specialization is an inevitable trend. At present, the law is becoming more and more sophisticated and complicated, the hierarchy of legal effectiveness is becoming more and more closely intertwined, and the logical reasoning of the application process of the law is becoming more and more complicated, which cannot be accurately understood and applied without a professionally trained judge. However, if judicial power is highly monopolized by professional judges, it will also bring about the lack of democratic legitimacy, leading to arbitrary judgment, partiality and even corruption of judges in closed circles. In addition, in the modern society with increasingly detailed division of labor, solving professional and technical problems in disputes requires the participation and support of all sectors of society in order to make the referee more accurate and reasonable. Therefore, on the one hand, judicial specialization should still be listed as the top priority of current judicial reform. First of all, we should improve the unified judicial examination system, so that judges, prosecutors and lawyers have roughly the same legal education background and professional experience, ensure that they have roughly the same knowledge structure, and raise the threshold of legal profession. On this basis, the high salary and life tenure of judges are implemented to ensure the independent personality of judges, so that judges will not bend the law arbitrarily for the sake of living conditions and power, but only be responsible for the law and their own conscience. On the other hand, the professionalization reform should also try to avoid social alienation, and avoid falling into the dilemma that Professor Su Yaochang, a Taiwan Province scholar, said, "The more professional judges are, the more self-righteous they are, the less people understand and the less they trust the judiciary". When interpreting and applying the law, professional judges must realize that China society, which has been immersed in the human ethics society and bad order for one or two thousand years, is basically exclusive to the law because of its insensitivity, value neutrality and inflexibility. Therefore, through the openness and transparency of the courts, the public's participation in trials and the popularization of judgments, the predictability of the law brought about by specialization will be enhanced, and the general public will not be caught in the fog and feel alienated from the abstruse mystery of the law. (The author is a postdoctoral researcher at Wuhan University Law School)