Introduction

Digital rule of law is a new form of human rule of law in the digital age, representing a brand-new operation mode of rule of law. From the perspective of components, digital rule of law includes such basic elements as digital rule of law institutions, digital legal profession, digital legal clients, digital legal system, digital legal technology, and digital infrastructure. From the perspective of application scenarios, the construction of digital rule of law will cover legislation, law enforcement, justice, dispute resolution, legal services and other fields of rule of law, but the pace and progress of each field are not the same. From the perspective of governance function, digital rule of law has the power to transform the unknown into the known, the impossible into the possible, and the impossible into the feasible. It will certainly open up a future rule of law landscape in which everything can be connected, everything can be copied, everything can be calculated, everything can be supervised, and everything can be intelligent.

The digital technological revolution represented by big data, cloud computing, blockchain and the meta-universe has brought about subversive changes to human modes of production, lifestyles and survival, and has also had a historic impact on human legal life, legal system and legal form. Digital rule of law is a new form of modern rule of law spawned by the digital technological revolution. It is reconstructing and reshaping the time, space, scenarios, methods and functions of the rule of law. From a global perspective, both established western developed countries and emerging market economies are accelerating the application of digital technology in the field of rule of law, and promoting the construction of digital rule of law to become a beautiful landscape of global rule of law development.

To build the most advanced digital rule of law model in the world is the major mission of the modernization of Chinese rule of law in the new era, as well as the inevitable requirement of the modernization of Chinese rule of law in the new era. Since the 18th CPC National Congress, the modernization of Chinese style rule of law has combined institutional and technological advantages, accelerated the process of digitization and intellectualization in the field of rule of law, opened up new areas and new tracks for the construction of rule of law, and created new drivers and strengths for the development of rule of law. Thanks to Chinese strong enthusiasm for scientific and technological innovation as well as its abundant financial resources, the construction of digital rule of law in China has achieved a sudden rise in the decade of the new era, and is now leading the world in digital policing, digital justice, digital prosecution, digital legal services and other fields. The Party’s 20th National Congress has incorporated the construction of digital China into the strategic layout of Chinese-style modernization, and made a scientific and systematic strategic plan for the construction of digital China in the new era and the new journey, which will lead the construction of digital rule of law in China to a new level.

1. Components of Digital rule of Law

Digital rule of law is an innovative development of the traditional form of rule of law, and represents a brand-new operation mode of rule of law. From rule of law institutions to rule of law infrastructure, from legal norms to legal technologies, from legal profession to legal clients, the elements of digital rule of law all have new standards and features.

First, digital rule of law institutions. Digital rule of law institutions refers to those that use digital tools and technologies to engage in legislation, law enforcement, justice and legal services, including digital people’s congresses, digital governments, digital courts and digital procuratorates. Since the beginning of the 21st century, Western developed countries have continued to promote the construction of digital rule of law institutions with digital government as the leading role. Although the digital construction of legal institutions in China did not start early, it has been promoted rapidly and achieved remarkable results. In terms of the construction of the “digital People’s Congress”, although the country has not explicitly put forward the concept of “digital People’s Congress”, many places are actively promoting the construction of “digital People’s Congress”, building a “People’s Congress data platform” with multi-system operation, multi-network links and multi-path communication, using digital technologies and tools to collect people’s sentiment, absorb public opinion and gather people’s wisdom. To better perform the functions and powers of legislation, supervision and decisions on major issues. On the construction of digital government, the CPC Central Committee and The State Council have identified digital government construction as a major project in the modernization of national governance, promoted the deep integration of legalization and digitalization in government governance, and accelerated the construction of a new form of digital and intelligent government operation. In terms of the construction of digital courts, the Supreme People’s Court has clearly put forward the concept of “smart court”, which is closely related to digital courts, and comprehensively promoted the construction of the system of “smart establishment, smart adjudication, smart enforcement, smart service and smart management”, so as to construct a smart court system characterized by digitalization, sunshine and intelligence. In the construction of digital procuratorates, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate has put forward the concept of “digital procuratorate work” on the basis of summing up the experience of smart procuratorate work, so as to drive the high-quality development of procuratorate work in the new era with the “digital revolution”.

Second, digital legal profession. The legal profession is a professional force in the operation and operation of the rule of law, which directly determines the quality and level of the construction of the rule of law. The digital legal profession is not a simple transformation of the traditional legal profession, but the innovative development of the traditional legal profession. Digital legal profession can be divided into two categories: the first category is the transformation and upgrading of traditional legal profession, that is, the legal professionals who skillfully use digital technology and tools to engage in legislation, law enforcement, justice, legal services and other work. Legislators, law enforcement personnel, judges, prosecutors, lawyers and other professional professions in the digital era should be compound talents proficient in both legal professional knowledge and digital technology, and able to skillfully engage in the rule of law work under various digital rule of law scenarios. The second category is the new legal profession spawned by digital rule of law, that is, the professional and technical personnel engaged in the research and development of digital technology and the operation of infrastructure in the field of rule of law. Since digital technology and digital infrastructure are key elements of digital rule of law, the importance of digital technology R&D personnel and infrastructure operation personnel is self-evident. Of course, the inclusion of them in the category of legal profession means that they must not only have superb expertise in digital technology, but also have solid legal expertise.

Third, digital rule of law users. Digital rule of law is a user-centered rule of law model. Digital rule of law users can be divided into two categories: first, individual users, that is, digital citizens who can live, work and communicate with digital tools in a qualified, legal and reasonable manner. Some scholars have refined the “three themes and nine elements” of digital citizenship, namely respect (digital etiquette, digital access, digital law), education (including digital literacy, digital communication, digital commerce), and protection (digital rights and responsibilities, digital security, and digital health). Second, enterprise users, that is, digital enterprises that use digital technology to connect consumers, employees and partners, promote digitalization of assets, equipment, management, products and services, and build dynamic, transparent, efficient, agile and intelligent operation system. In the digital era, digital citizens and digital enterprises are not only the consumers of digital rule of law, but also the driving force for its development. On the one hand, it is the increasingly strong digital demand of these users that motivates or forces the legal institutions and legal profession to provide digital legal products and legal services, and build a faster and more efficient digital legal network. On the other hand, digital rule of law, as the governance system of digital society, also plays an important role in guiding digital citizens and digital enterprises to become rational and responsible digital subjects.

Fourth, digital legal system. The digital legal system is a new form of legal norms in the digital era, including substantive rules, procedural rules, technical standards and other basic elements. Entity rules refer to the rules that adjust the entity rights and obligations among digital subjects. For example, rules on data property rights and their utilization, rules on data trading, flow and sharing, and rules on the security of personal data and public data. Procedural rules refer to rules of litigation and non-litigation procedure for resolving disputes in digital society. For example, procedural rules on litigation and mediation of online disputes. China leads the world in exploring procedures and systems for online dispute resolution. It was the first country in the world to introduce rules for online court litigation, online mediation and online operation, making Chinese contribution to innovative litigation theories and modes. Technical standards refer to various objective standards for qualitative and quantitative evaluation of products, behaviors, environment and other factors in the digital society. Technical standards have traditionally been excluded from the constituent elements of law. The practice of digital rule of law will produce a large number of technical standards with legal significance, and promote technical standards to become the dominant legal elements in the legal system.

Fifth, digital legal technology. Although from the perspective of human legal history, the development level of science and technology is one of the decisive factors affecting the scope of legal adjustment, fact recognition, system design, concept thinking and other aspects, science and technology has always been regarded as the external and auxiliary factors of the legal system. In the past, the legal technologies and methods discussed in the legal field were mostly legal technologies such as legal discovery, legal interpretation, legal reasoning and legal argumentation, and science and technology were rarely included in the category of legal technology. Entering the era of digital rule of law, digital technology has become an intrinsic, independent and indispensable element of the rule of law system, and penetrates into legislation, law enforcement, judicature, law popularization, legal supervision, legal services and other fields and links, directly affecting the quality and level of the provision of the rule of law. In the course of the future development of the rule of law, a small step forward in digital technology will bring a big step forward in the development of digital rule of law.

Sixth, digital rule of law infrastructure. The effective operation of traditional law usually requires only courts, prisons, detention centers, judicial equipment and other instrumental facilities. The operation of digital rule of law requires a new kind of legal infrastructure, that is, digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure also includes hardware and software. The former refers to the hardware facilities supporting the computing, storage, communication, display, operation control and other functions of various data systems, while the latter refers to various software systems such as intelligent identification, intelligent decision-making, intelligent case handling, intelligent service and intelligent management. In China, how to promote the new digital rule of law infrastructure is an urgent task for the construction of rule of law infrastructure in the new era. For the construction of Chinese smart court system project, some experts have proposed the “dual-track and six-ring linkage” progressive collaborative system engineering model framework, namely, autonomous system research and development, collaborative system integration “dual-track” parallel, theoretical support, development planning, system design, standard formulation, scientific research, promotion and improvement of the “six-ring linkage”.

2. Application scenarios of digital rule of Law

The main links of modern rule of law operation, from legislation, law enforcement, justice to dispute resolution and legal services, are the key scenarios of digital rule of law application. However, due to the different rule of law operation links of the rule of law subject, work characteristics are different, the pace and progress of digital process is not the same.

The legislative field, especially the legislative field of parliament, is usually a relatively slow and lagging digitalization process. This is largely determined by the institutional nature of parliament and the fundamental characteristics of legislation. The fundamental nature of Parliament is to discuss, argue and debate on the spot, with a large number of Members facing each other. Legislation is the sacred work of setting standards for society, which requires collective rational thinking, discernment and deliberation. Therefore, the legislative work should be mainly done by the legislative subject in physical space in accordance with legal procedures. The digital intelligence system can only play a supporting role in the legislative work, such as collecting public opinions online and soliciting opinions online.

Law enforcement is the most promising field for digital development. To build a new model of digital law enforcement is the common meaning of digital government and rule of law government construction in all countries. Chinese Implementation Outline for Building a Law-based Government (2021-2025) clearly states: “We will actively promote smart law enforcement and strengthen the allocation and application of information technology and equipment. Handheld enforcement of administrative law enforcement apps will be implemented. Explore the implementation of off-site supervision featuring remote supervision, mobile supervision, early warning prevention and control, so as to solve the problem of too few people and too many tasks. We will accelerate the construction of a national comprehensive management and supervision information system for administrative law enforcement, integrate basic law enforcement data, circulation of law enforcement procedures and disclosure of law enforcement information, and establish a national database for administrative law enforcement.”

The judicial field is the field that digital construction advances all the way. In recent years, the courts of many countries have accelerated the in-depth application of digital technology in the judicial field, and carried out explorations in electronic court, network court, smart court, digital court, etc., which has set off a digital judicial revolution on a global scale. Digital justice mainly includes two kinds of application scenarios: external and internal. The digital justice in the external scenario is mainly for the participants in litigation, and it builds a networked and digital litigation service platform to promote the operation of prosecution, filing, evidence submission, material acceptance, court hearing, service and execution on the platform, which is also called “digital litigation”. In the internal scene, digital justice is mainly for the internal personnel of the court, to build a digital judicial business management and security platform, improve the online office, case management, trial quality and effectiveness assessment and other internal management.

Non-litigious dispute resolution is a strong field of digital development. Compared with procedural, confrontational and coercive litigation mechanisms, the advantages of non-litigious dispute resolution mechanisms such as negotiation, mediation and arbitration lie in convenience, simplicity, desirability and low cost. The application of digital technology and tools in the field of non-litigious dispute resolution can not only consolidate and expand the inherent advantages of non-litigious dispute resolution mechanism, but also promote the interconnection between the non-litigious dispute resolution system and the court’s litigious dispute resolution system, forming an integrated dispute resolution network with division of labor, distribution and docking. In the face of the rapid growth of all kinds of contradictions and disputes in today’s society, both the government and the market subjects have shown a strong impetus to promote the digitalization of non-litigious dispute resolution mechanism. As far as market players are concerned, e-commerce platforms have to explore and establish a convenient, fair and efficient online dispute resolution mechanism due to a large number of small transaction disputes, such as the “Xianyu Small Court” established by Alibaba’s Xianyu platform. In 2018, the E-commerce Law confirmed the legality of the independent establishment of digital dispute resolution mechanism by e-commerce platforms, and encouraged e-commerce platforms to provide consumers with efficient and convenient ways to protect their rights. Article 63 of the law stipulates: “Operators of e-commerce platforms may establish an online dispute resolution mechanism, formulate and publicize dispute resolution rules, and resolve disputes fairly and impartially according to the principle of voluntariness.”

The field of legal services is one of steady progress in digitization. Both government and market entities are trying to use digital technology to provide more convenient, efficient, intelligent and accurate legal services to the public. Globally, law firms are the main force behind the digitalization of legal services, and digital law firms have become a new model for the development of law institutions. “Digital law firm is a new model of law firm based on digital products to establish data flow and data analysis capabilities, and then realize organizational innovation, talent innovation, product innovation and business innovation.” These digital law firms promote the digitization of projects, business and management, and improve the quality and efficiency of legal services through the research and development and application of digital intelligence legal service system.

3. Prominent functions of digital rule of law

The revolutionary impact of digital rule of law is that it can break many difficulties of traditional rule of law, transform the unknown into the known, the impossible into the possible, and the impossible into the feasible, improve the quality and effectiveness of the rule of law work in a way beyond imagination, and open up a better vision of future rule of law. This future rule of law picture can be summarized as everything is connected, everything can be copied, everything can be calculated, everything can be supervised and everything can be intelligent.

Everything can be connected. The digital rule of law integrates legal institutions, legal profession and legal clients through digital tools and digital infrastructure to achieve instantaneous, zero-distance and low-cost communication. In recent years, political and legal authorities are accelerating the construction of “Internet plus government services”, extending all services that can be expanded online to the Internet, so that parties can get things done at home and at their fingertips. For example, the court system uses the Internet to carry out cross-domain filing and litigation services, and has built a cross-regional and cross-level filing service platform for courts at four levels, so that people can Sue locally and throughout the country. For another example, by building a cross-departmental big data platform for case handling, political and legal authorities have promoted the connectivity of facilities, platforms and data of case handling systems, realized cross-departmental data sharing and exchange, collaborative business handling and reengineering of case handling process, thus greatly saving the cost of case handling.

Everything can be copied. Digital technology models the physical world into the digital world by converting all kinds of information in the physical world into binary digits that can be recognized by the computer for calculation, processing, storage, transmission and restoration. Taking facts as the basis is the basic principle for judicial organs to handle cases justly. However, in the era of relying on material objects or witnesses to record facts, material objects will be damaged and lost with the passage of time, and witnesses will age and die with the passage of time. In this way, the facts of a case will be lost in the stream of history, and difficult problems will arise that cannot be reproduced, resulting in an accurate judgment on the merits of the case. In the digital age, since everything that happens in the real society can be copied and stored in digital form, historical facts can be reproduced and traced in the digital space.

Everything is calculable, which means using big data technology to calculate massive legal data, to know the unknown from the known and predict the future from the past, so as to enhance the early warning, prediction and prevention ability of the rule of law. In the operation practice of traditional law, due to the lack of prediction ability caused by backward science and technology, the law can only be dealt with after the occurrence of illegal crimes, conflicts and disputes, but it is difficult to prevent before the occurrence of illegal crimes, conflicts and disputes. The sages of ancient China have long recognized the functional limitations of the law, which is that the law can only be “banned after”, rather than “banned before”. The advent of the digital age helps to break this functional limitation of the law, and promote the transformation of the mode of legal intervention from post-implementation response to pre-prevention intervention. For example, the subject of social governance can predict the possible conflicts and disputes or illegal crimes in the future from the “clues” through big data calculation and analysis, so as to take actions in advance to intervene, resolve the conflicts and disputes in the embryonic stage, and prevent the illegal crimes in the preparatory stage.

Everything can be supervised, which refers to the digitization of the whole process of the operation of public power, will weave an iron cage of digital supervision of public power, and truly let all public power exercise under supervision and operate in the sunshine. Compared with traditional supervision methods, digital supervision can break through the constraints of human resources, information, time, space and other factors, realize accurate supervision in the whole space and time, and open up a new picture of power supervision. For example, digital supervision can leave a mark on the whole process of exercising public power through digital means, and carry out retrospective and retrospective supervision afterwards, so as to overcome the problem that it is difficult to enter the field supervision due to the shortage of supervisors. It can integrate all kinds of public power operation data in a digital way, realize comprehensive supervision across departments, levels and regions, and crack the problem of fragmentation and isolation of power supervision. Can use big data technology to deal with a large number of cases and mass information, screen out problem clues according to predetermined instructions, crack the human brain information processing capacity, calculate and process mass information according to predetermined instructions, screen out problem clues.

Everything can be intelligent, which means speeding up the intelligent construction on the basis of digitalization, promoting the whole process of legislation, law enforcement, justice, legal consultation and legal service intelligence, and realizing intelligent data collection, intelligent inquiry response, intelligent material flow and intelligent document generation. At present, the court system is promoting the intellectualization of the whole judicial process through the development and application of intelligent prosecution guide robot, trial speech recognition system, intelligent auxiliary case handling system, intelligent trial management system, intelligent execution system and other intelligent systems. The intellectualization of the whole process of the rule of law work can not only improve the timeliness, convenience and efficiency of the supply of the rule of law products, but also solve the problem of the small number of cases commonly faced by modern countries under the rule of law, and liberate the limited human resources from the replaceable labor of the number of intelligence system and put them into the core business that the number of intelligence system cannot replace.

Translated by: Liu Yuwei