by Susan Finder
One of the unexpected influences of the United States system on the Chinese courts is the Supreme People’s Court’s (SPC) elite internship program, instituted in 2015. (The German system of requiring law students to intern in courts, too, is an apparent influence). The word of mouth is that the SPC leadership noted that the US Supreme Court clerkships attracted top law students and wanted to do something similar in China.
The program is a small example of “foreign beneficial experience,” about which I wrote about earlier this year. The official position on borrowing/referring to foreign legal models is set out in the 4th Plenum Decision (as I wrote earlier):
Draw from the quintessence of Chinese legal culture, learn from beneficial experiences in rule of law abroad, but we can absolutely not indiscriminately copy foreign rule of law concepts and models.
President Xi Jinping’s further gloss on this is:
China shall actively absorb and refer to successful legal practices worldwide, but they must be filtered, they must be selectively absorbed and transformed, they may not be swallowed whole and copied (对世界上的优秀法治文明成果，要积极吸收借鉴，也要加以甄别，有选择地吸收和转化，不能囫囵吞枣、照搬照抄).
Unlike Supreme Court clerkships, which are done by recent law graduates, SPC interns are generally required to be students, generally at the master’s or PhD level. The SPC selects several dozen outstanding students (the number seems to vary) to participate in the sixth month program. They must be recommended by their law schools (each runs its own selection process)–see this notice by China University of Political Science and Law. Applications are made to the Political Department of the SPC (it handles personnel matters) rather than to individual judges. The program is part of the SPC’s outreach to educational institutions and efforts to create a more elite judiciary.
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