Peng Yali: Labeled cases, unlabeled life

Editor's Note

For over a century, Tsinghua University has been a hub for cultivating exceptional talents, including those who have made significant contributions to various fields through their intellectual pursuits. Join us as we explore the stories of these outstanding young scholars in our new series, DocTalk. From innovative ideas to groundbreaking research, we'll showcase the diverse range of achievements of these young minds who are studying or studied at Tsinghua University. This piece looks into the story of Dr. Peng Yali, an alumna of Tsinghua Law School (LL.B.’16). She applies quantitative analysis in empirical studies of law and crime, exploring the mechanisms behind judicial process and the infinite possibilities of herself.

“After a legislative progress in 1997 that favors justifiable defense in criminal law,” asked Yali Peng, “how far have we gone in judicial practice?” Guided by this question, Yali and her team, then a group of undergraduate students at Tsinghua Law School, collected and gone through 2486 cases to depict a quantified picture of justifiable defense and to explain its limited judicial application.

This research supervised by Prof. Lao Dongyan was a great success in a competition and ignited the intellectual curiosity of Yali. Before graduation from Tsinghua, she had already decided to pursue a career of scholar and contribute to empirical studies of law. This dream was supported and facilitated by the “Spark Program” at Tsinghua, a program designed for undergraduates to catch a glimpse of academic exploration. In the project, Yali not only developed her quantitative skills, but also met a group of fellow students with various backgrounds and sparks of talents, which gave her insights and encouragement in the pursuit of knowledge. 

Besides, Yali also benefited from serving as an editor in Tsinghua China Law Review, a student-staffed journal that resembles the American style of legal reading, writing and even footnotes. Such a unique experience equipped Yali with the confidence and ability to read through extended English articles and thus opened a wider window for her to look around globally.

“To pass the interview of Rhodes Scholarship selection, you are expected to know your own experience well and understand your real pursuit.” Now as the Rhodes Scholarship Outreach Fellow for China, Yali still remembers her initial passion as a Rhodes Scholarship candidate in 2018 -- she expected to study criminology at Oxford with the scholarship, a field plowed by few Chinese scholars. From Yali’s perspective, the statute interpretation method is undoubtedly a significant tradition for lawyers. But the practice of law creates a far more sophisticated system, in which multiple legal and extralegal factors impose effects or distortions upon the output judgement. Therefore, only with an empirically solid and thorough scrutiny over these mechanisms in judicial process, can policy makers design more balanced and efficient incentives as well as eliminate any systematical discriminations against those marginal groups.

However, to read between blackletter lines of statutes and cases is never an easy job. Quantitative analysis and causal inference are the universal practice for social scientists but largely a newcomer for lawyers. Disclosed statistics and established data sets are not adequate enough in this field, which means some original researches must start with data collection and cleansing. As a pre-process, judicial cases are labeled and thus transformed into observations with variant features, such as the term of imprisonment, penalty fine, elements of crime and even extralegal factors like gender, ethnic group or age. 

The labeling work may be manual, which requires a teamwork, and may be alternatively achieved with machine learning, which demands more transdisciplinary cooperation. Both strategies challenge the traditional pattern of knowledge production and ask for a more diversified background of researchers, while also providing an opportunity for Yali and her young peers. “The previous generation of scholars have established a framework of law in China from a fresh start. Now it is time for a further exploration into empirical studies and more specific branches such as accurate sentencing,” believed Yali.

During her studies at Oxford and University of Chicago, Yali absorbed theoretical insights of law and social sciences. But she believes that concise and abstract theories should be put into a dialogue with solid, localized and even coarse reality. In a paper cooperated with Prof. Cheng Jinhua, she found that although the ethnic identities do influence the criminal sentence in various jurisdictions, the exact mechanism in Chinese courts might be interpreted differently – judges are deciding with more trade-off between social consequences in mind instead of personal prejudices, making a challenge and adjustment to the dominant “focal concerns perspective” theory.

For Yali, reality means more than plain facts. Behind labeled cases and data lies countless stories of ordinary people, who are faced with disputes and seek justice. Empirical studies, according to Yali, takes up the mission to shed light on the weak and the silent in the judicial process. In other words, it is the duty of scholars to unveil the concise tags of “crime”, “criminals” or “victims” and understand the dynamic interaction between our law and the society in which it is embedded. Now transformed from a student to an assistant professor and researcher in Renmin University of China, Yali is still working in the field of socio-legal studies. “I would like to be someone unlabeled,” said her, “someone open for changes.” Despite the pressure of publication and the challenging workload, Yali promises herself that someday she will pick up Spanish, explore new fields and embrace other changes.

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TsinghuaRen | Peng Yali: Labeled cases, unlabeled life

Writer: Chen Sihan

Editor: Huang Fei

Designer: Chen Sihan 

Reviewers: Xu Liang, Lin Yuan