On May 7, the Supreme People's Court issued the "Working Rules for the Construction and Operation of the People's Courts Case Database," effective from May 8, 2024. The Rules specify that state organs, law schools, bar associations and other units, as well as experts and scholars, lawyers and other individual citizens, may recommend reference cases to the People's Courts Case Database.

The People's Courts Case Database is a case resource database uniformly built by the Supreme People's Court for querying and retrieving similar cases. Building the People's Courts Case Database is conducive to assisting judicial adjudication, unifying adjudication standards and preventing "different judgments for similar cases," and, through the collection and screening of cases, promptly discovering and correcting problems in judicial adjudication work. At the same time, it also makes it convenient for the public to learn about legal provisions and clarify rules of conduct through cases, promotes the resolution of conflicts and disputes at the front end, and produces the effect of "publishing one case and educating a broad audience." This is of great benefit to safeguarding the public's right to supervise the judiciary, promoting judicial openness, enhancing judicial democracy, and making fairness and justice tangible, perceptible and credible.

In recent years, the Supreme People's Court has attached great importance to the construction of the case database. Following the launch of the China Judgments Online website on July 1, 2013, and in response to the shortcomings of China Judgments Online—which is positioned to highlight judicial openness but has few authoritative reference cases and thus finds it difficult to meet the needs of all sectors of society—the Supreme People's Court officially launched the People's Courts Case Database in March this year, selecting a large number of reference cases that are the best of the best, refined and polished, standardized in format, complete in elements and easy to retrieve. While providing authoritative guidance and important reference for judges handling corresponding cases, these cases also provide precise and authoritative reference and guidance for lawyers, litigants and others, and have been widely praised.

It should be noted that, whether it is China Judgments Online, which has been running for more than ten years, or the newly launched People's Courts Case Database, the selected cases are all cases examined and approved by courts at all levels, and do not include cases recommended by all sectors of society and relevant institutions. Although this approach reflects to the greatest extent the leading role of the adjudicative organs in selecting cases, the failure to absorb cases recommended by all sectors of society and relevant institutions also makes it difficult for the People's Courts Case Database to cover other reference cases outside the adjudicative organs that have typical demonstrative and guiding significance. In view of this, the People's Courts Case Database should proactively open its "door" and absorb reference cases with typical demonstrative and guiding significance from outside the adjudicative organs, demonstrating a broad and inclusive spirit. This will help comprehensively enrich the types of cases in the People's Courts Case Database and meet needs at different levels.

"Opening the door" to absorb recommended cases from outside the adjudicative organs is a vivid practice of proactively drawing on public wisdom and helps promote judicial democracy. "The judiciary is authoritative because of democracy." As a database aimed at providing precise and authoritative reference and guidance cases for different groups, the People's Courts Case Database should uphold judicial democracy in its construction and improvement, fully open the "door" for case selection, allow cases of various typical demonstrative and guiding significance to enter the database, and continuously enrich the sources and channels of cases in the database.

This will not only provide judges with specific references in all aspects when trying cases and help them escape the awkward situation of "different judgments for similar cases" that may result from insufficient perspective, but will also better reflect judicial democracy because it respects public opinion. It is believed that as efforts to "open the door" and absorb recommended cases from outside the adjudicative organs continue to increase, the public's enthusiasm for actively participating in case recommendation will continue to rise, and the selection of cases for the People's Courts Case Database will, in a strong atmosphere of judicial democracy, achieve full coverage of different types of typical cases and serve the needs of different groups more precisely.

One case is better than a stack of documents. Building the People's Courts Case Database by "opening the door" is an inherent requirement for the people's courts to practice judicial democracy and strive to give play to the reference case database in meeting the public's judicial needs. Courts at all levels should, with the perseverance of "one part deployment, nine parts implementation," fully and faithfully do solid work in absorbing recommended cases from a wider range of sources, so that the construction of the People's Courts Case Database bears fruit in precisely meeting the public's diversified judicial needs.