There are also reasons for the other rules. Hearsay rules exist on the premise that the evidence will be considered by an untrained jury that is likely to be swayed by weak evidence, whereas civil law court systems have cases heard before a judge.

For due process, there is such as thing as too much due process. Because civil law courts think out of court settlements are a generally bad thing, they do not want trials that can go on for years and years, so the trial procedures are set up so that the trials are quick and efficient, even if sometimes the outcome may imperfect, on the theory that justice delayed is justice denied.

As far as counsel of one's choice and conflicts of interest. In principle lawyers everywhere are officers of the court, and some places place the duty to the client versus duty to the state or duty to society differently than where the US or England draws the line.

One thing that you see when you look at comparative law is that different may or may not be bad. People do things in different ways, and sometimes different is better, sometimes it's worse, sometimes different is just different. But if you just study one legal system you often have no idea how different other systems are, and you come up with the mistaken idea that there is just one true way of doing justice right.

The terms "judicial review" and "stare decesis" mean something quite different in English and US law. (In US law, judicial review generally refers to constitutional issues, and stare decesis does not prevent a court from overturning its own rulings.)

If you and another party are in settlement talks in say Germany, and it is obvious that you are offering a settlement in "good faith" (i.e. you are trying to be fair and reasonable), this will help you if the case goes to a civil law court, and if the opposing party takes the information you've provided and going to court trying to bash you with it, the court will see this as a lack of "good faith" and they generally won't allow the evidence to be used that way.

In common law, the courts are less likely to look at the motives and intentions of the people involved, and judges are much less willing or able to use their own discretion so if you say something and the opposing party tries to use it to bash you later, the judge has very little discretion to prevent this, so people come up with another rule saying that certain communications cannot be used against you in reaching a settlement. Note that this applies only to private law, in criminal law, as the cops are required to warn you, "anything you say can and will be used against you."

The other thing is that Chinese settlement negotiations usually are shorter than negotiations in England or the US. Part of the reason for this is that in Chinese law, there is often nothing to negotiate. There was damage, the facts are not under dispute, there is a legal formula for calculating damages, what's there to discuss? In the US, there isn't a formula for calculating damages.

Also this isn't a China thing. If you take a US lawyer and put them in France or Germany or even Canada, there are some odd things. For that matter you often see strange things if you cross state or even county lines.

Apparently this isn't a civil/common law thing because France, Spain, and the Netherlands have different rules.

http://www.eurojuris.net/assets/deontology.pdf

It's also fascinating how *different* the rules are for country to country.

One thing that I found that I thought was *really* weird is that in some countries I think Spain, lawyers have a "professional secrets privilege" which requires them to withhold information from their clients. Which means that you have the situation in which the lawyers will negotiate a settlement, but they would then be barred from communicating any secret information they received from opposing counsel to their clients.

This creates some very interesting situations when you have cross-border negotiations.