Digital advances herald judicial progress

Happy despite hardship

Before she was transferred to the Chaoyang court in 1991, Ren worked for the Weiyang District People's Court in Xi'an, Shaanxi province. In both cities, the courts shared office buildings with other government departments such as the justice and the finance bureaus.

Ren said working in this environment was hard. "I was in the same room with two other judges. If we all heard cases at the same time, it would be difficult for us and our litigants not to affect each other," she said.

Another retired judge He Huiying, 65, has a similar story. In 1979, when she came to the court in Beijing's Tongzhou district to work, it was just a courtyard and a row of bungalows, no specialized courtrooms, judge's benches and robes.

"At that time, judges had to ride around to figure out the root causes of conflicts and notify residents involved in disputes to attend their trials," said He, who retired in 2014. "The longest ride took me more than an hour and a half to reach the place where the dispute occurred."

Even creating legal documents back then was a long process, according to He. A judgment or mediation agreement needed to be first handwritten by judges, and then sent to a typing room where typists typed it on wax paper with an old-fashioned typewriter and printed it with ink. Finally, the judges checked the correctness and stamped it, she said.

Ren recalled with a smile, "In the 1990s, a clerk and I completed more than 500 cases a year, all written by hand. Afterward, we were too tired to lift our arms."

Despite the lack of convenient transportation and intelligent tech, neither of the two retired judges complain about the hardships and fatigue they faced in those years.

"Whenever I prepared to write a verdict by hand, I was actually very happy, because it meant that the facts had been found out and the case would be over. It's good both for me and the litigants," He added.