| As the non-professional judge participating in the trial, the people’s assessor system has suddenly entered into a period of strong recovery since 1998 when the judicial professionalization heated up in China. From the perspective of Sociology of law, emerging, transforming and declining of the legal system always depend on the relationship between its potential functions, social requirements and social environments. Accordingly, this paper provides a positive study on the recovery and practices of people’s assessor system, which finds that the recovery of this system maybe the product of various social needs, bearing many expectations such as supervising judges, promoting judicial justice and advancing judicial authority. However, under the influences of formal and informal power structures in the judicial process, people’s assessor always could not effectively participate in the judicial decision-making. Therefore, in contemporary judicial practices, the people’s assessors mainly act as human resource supplement, mediator and knowledge supplier in special cases, and other expectations are unaffordable for them.Those roles undertaken by the people’s assessors are out of the expectations of the institution designers and the common people, which may be called as “function dissimilation”. Future reform efforts should be made to achieve “function differentiation”. On the one hand, the importance of people’s assessors’ current role in special cases and minor cases ought to be advanced. On the other hand, it is necessary to enhance the people’s assessors’ representation and ensure they can play a practical role in important cases. |
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