LIAO Yi

 

Abstract: In China today, the imagination of access to justice has become a cultural motivation for promoting human rights and the rule of law. Not only politicians and lawyers have become interested in the concept and system of “access to justice”, but mass culture has also begun to outline its skeleton shape as a whole. From the initial natural rights to the modern social rights, “access to justice” as a discourse of human rights has undergone great changes in signifier and signification. The relevant discourse analysis has multiple aspects. This article takes "Twelve Citizens" as the analysis material, and uses the inner tension of compound equilibrium as a clue to construct a cultural interpretation framework for access to justice discourse from three aspects: genealogy, production and narrative. Firstly, the genealogical study of right discourse excludes the origin of deterministic discourse, and transplantation and localization can hardly be completely separated. Secondly, in the process of right discourse production, we can also find the "dual-track" dialectics of system and market, and the cooperation between lawyers and artists, state power and private capital. Finally, in order to achieve a narrative framework, the discourse of the access to justice needs to be based on a minimum consensus of justice between the elite and the public. The right of access to justice is not only related to the internal culture of the legal profession, but also to the overlapping consensus of social justice. It is a new way to understand the practice of human rights discourse by analyzing the production of human rights discourse in different subjects and ascertaining the process of cultural mobilization. The transplanted human rights discourse, in order to grasp the masses, transform the world and obtain the material power, must reflect on its inherent cultural standpoint or even reverse, and produce revolutionary changes. Such discourses may really convince the public in the new era.

 

Key words: access to justice；human rights discourse；popular culture