Introduction

This chapter serves as the introduction to the book. By presenting descriptions of heavy judicial workloads from individual judges in countries such as China, the United States, India, and South Korea, as well as statements from successive Presidents of the Supreme People’s Court of China in their annual Work Reports regarding the problem of “high caseloads with insufficient personnel” in Chinese courts, this chapter demonstrates that the central research questions of this book are how to effectively and scientifically measure the phenomenon of high caseloads with insufficient personnel and through which reasonable approaches the challenges posed by the judicial capacity crisis can be addressed. At the same time, the chapter clearly points out that courts around the world rely, to varying degrees, on strengthened court management to address the global problem of case-judge imbalance/ This book primarily employs empirical research methods to describe the realities and theorize the experiences of China, offering a comparative law-based work for global readers to understand the “Chinese solutions.”