本文利用2724份上海法院的裁判文书对格兰特关于强势一方相对于弱势一方在诉讼中占有优势的论断进行了检验,发现强势一方不仅更容易胜诉,而且胜诉的可能性要大大高于弱势一方。总体而言,机构诉讼主体在诉讼中要比个人诉讼主体占优势。如果将诉讼主体按照机构及社会性质分类,政府机构和政府企业是最大的赢家,占有巨大的优势;而农民处于最为不利的地位,其他个人和企业居于二者中间。强势方的优势在不同法律领域的不同案件类型中都会呈现。与已有的比较研究成果相呼应,我们也对诉讼主体能力理论有所质疑。我们推断,在中国,司法不平等的原因不仅在于资源的差异,同时也在于法律的渊源以及法院的性质。

Drawing on 2,724 documents of adjudication decisions from Shanghai courts, this article tests the Galanter thesis that the stronger party tends to prevail over the weaker party in litigation. We find that the stronger parties not only win more often, but also do so by a large margin. Overall, institutional litigants fare better than individual litigants. When the litigants are classified by their organizational and social status, government agencies or government-related companies are the biggest winners, enjoying an enormous advantage, and farmers are the most disadvantaged underdogs, with other individuals and companies in between. When controlling for legal representation, these winning gaps remain significant and sizable. The edge of the stronger parties recurs across categories of cases in different issue areas of the law. Echoing previous comparative studies, we cast doubt on the party capability theory. We speculate that the causes of judicial inequality in China lie not only in resource gaps but also in the roots of the law and the nature of the court.