Because under a civil law system, judges are not supposed to make law and law comes from the legislature. Chinese tort law is a mess of practices and ad-hoc decisions that needs to be systematized and codified. In common law countries, it's largely judges that create new law by case-by-case decisions. This is not how things work in civil law systems.

The reason that it needs to be codified is that the laws that exist deal with *current* situations. If you have a new and unusual situation involving torts that no one has ever thought of, you need to set of systematic principles to determine how the case is to be decided, and what the NPC is doing with the Tort Law is to take existing practice, figure out what the are basic principles that describe existing practice, codify them, and so when you come up with some new and original case that no one has ever thought of, you have some system for dealing with it.

Steve: The standard three volume treatise on Chinese tort law by Yang Lixin 杨立新 is over 2,500 pages long. The draft tort law is only 25 pages long. There is simply no way this law will have any impact on tort law in China and one even has to wonder why the People's Congress is even bothering with it.

The whole point of codification is to turn that 2500 pages into 25 pages. The theory behind civil law codification is that you take 2500 pages of practice and then turn them into 25 pages of basic principles through which a reasonable intelligent person can read, understand, and then make the same decisions that they would have had they read 2500 pages of text.

The role of a judge in a civil law system and common law system is *very* different. Typically a judge in a common law system is going to have decades of legal experience before becoming a judge. A judge in a civil law system could be fresh out of college with nothing more than a four year bachelors. Setting up a system so that a judge can read 25 pages of law, and maybe another 100 pages of commentary and make correct decisions is the point of codification. Part of why the Tort Law is important is that it puts everything in one place. So that the judge can look at one law rather than fifty.

Also there is a lot that is interesting in civil law codification. When people do legal codification, there are fights on practically every word and every character of the law.

If you can distill everything into 25 pages with maybe another 100 pages of commentary, then you have something that a judge in rural Hunan can read, understand it, and then make decisions that are more or less what someone that has read all 2500 pages of a tort law treatise would make.

So yes the Tort Law is a big deal since the practice aspects of getting justice in China are more important than the theoretical aspects.