Abstract “Treating Like Cases Alike” can be achieved through precedents. In the civil law system, judges also use precedents. In China, there are two kinds of precedents: “Vertical Precedents” and “Horizontal Precedents.” These two kinds of precedents are made to achieve the goal of “Treating Like Cases Alike.” Prior research testing the theory in sentencing disparity field usually ignored the reasoning part and often used a systematic view. To fill these gaps, this study mainly focuses on whether Chinese judges produce consistent results, especially considering the reasoning part. We collect 5,839 robbery and 12,243 theft judicial documents from 2018 to 2021 on China Judgement Online, use Relaxed Word’s Mover Distance (RWMD) to calculate every two cases’ facts and reasoning similarity, and use Euclidean distance to calculate the sentencing similarity. Then we use linear regression to see if each case was treated equally. We find that: (i) overall, judges produce consistent reasoning and sentencing more frequently; (ii) judges perform better in reasoning, but they do not produce consistent sentencing results; this results in a phenomenon where an inconsistent outcome sometimes accompanies a proper judicial opinion; and (iii) overall, judges produce more consistent reasoning and less consistent sentencing in complex cases than in simple cases.
M et al. (Thu,) studied this question.