Time: 9:30 – 11:00 am

Venue: Room 303, 3/F, Esther Lee Building (ELB), CUHK

Speaker: Prof. Ethan Michelson, Professor of Sociology and Law, Indiana University Bloomington 

Moderator: Prof. Jing SONG, Associate Professor, Gender Studies Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Associate Researcher (by courtesy), Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract:
For his 2022 book, Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts, Michelson analyzed the written court decisions of almost 150,000 divorce trials in two Chinese provinces spanning 2009 and 2016. Although domestic violence claims were common and often supported by evidence, they had no effect whatsoever on the likelihood the court granted the divorce petition. His new project goes beyond written court decisions by analyzing how judges deal with domestic violence claims during courtroom trial proceedings. By comparing what happens in trials and what judges write about them in over 4,000 divorce cases across China between 2019 and 2024, Michelson discovered a substantial number of troubling omissions in written court decisions. Just as Xin He and Kwai Ng reported over a decade ago that domestic violence is “erased” when Chinese courts dispose of divorce cases through judicial mediation, Michelson finds that domestic violence allegations and evidence similarly “vanish” in the adjudication process as judges write their decisions. As a result, the prevalence of domestic violence claims in divorce trials is even greater than what he reported in his book. In addition to presenting new empirical findings, Michelson will discuss methodological strategies for analyzing a corpus of video data totaling over 2,000 hours.

Speaker’s Biography:
Ethan Michelson is Professor of Sociology and Law at Indiana University Bloomington, where he has been teaching courses on law and society, law and authoritarianism, and contemporary Chinese society since 2003. He has won several awards for his published research on China’s legal system.

Language: English

Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13716479