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With the adoption of the Foreign State Immunity Law in September 2023, China officially switches from absolute State immunity to restrictive State immunity. This paper analyses selected provisions of the new law which are likely to cause problems in practice. In addition, the paper also reflects upon the marginal position of Chinese courts in immunity cases in the past and the implication of the new law under the principle of "One Country, Two Systems". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magistrates, judges and prosecutors, as the main actors on the legal scene, do not benefit from absolute immunity, therefore they can be held legally liable, which wears the five forms, respectively: criminal, civil, moral, contraventional and disciplinary. To avoid this, magistrates must demonstrate good faith and responsibility, both professionally and personally. In the paper, special emphasis is placed on disciplinary liability, indicating what constitutes disciplinary misconduct, what is its structure and what are disciplinary violations, as well as disciplinary sanctions with the addition of examples from the practice of the two sections of the Superior Council of Magistracy, as a disciplinary court, as well as the panel of 5 judges of the ÎCCJ, as an appeals court. At the end, the disciplinary process is presented, indicating the stages that must be completed in order to bring the magistrate judge or prosecutor to disciplinary responsibility. In the paper, I proposed by law ferenda, the addition within article 271 of Law no. 303/2022 regarding the status of judges and prosecutors of the disciplinary offense of noncompliance with the decisions of the Constitutional Court or the decisions issued by the ÎCCJ, in the resolution of appeals in the interest of the law and in the prior resolution of some legal issues; because there is an extremely high risk that the magistrates will not give importance to these decisions, since their non-compliance is no longer provided as a disciplinary offence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provision of expert testimony in litigation has become a big business. The paradigmatic testifying expert is no longer the "amateur" expert who maintains a separate professional identity and testifies only once, or at most sporadically, in litigation to which their expertise is uniquely pertinent. Rather, they are a professional provider of litigation support services who spends a substantial part of their time, and derives a substantial part of their income from, consulting on pending or contemplated lawsuits. Legal rules concerning the provision of expert testimony continue to apply the former, obsolete paradigm of the testifying expert. This conflict of paradigms becomes especially acute when a former client accuses a testifying expert of professional malpractice. In other contexts, professional service providers are liable for injuries caused to their client by the service provider's failure to act with professional competence. In the case of testifying experts, however, some courts and scholars maintain that the absolute immunity extended to participants in judicial proceedings preempts the law of professional malpractice that would otherwise apply. This Article makes two contributions to the discussion of expert malpractice liability. It is the first Article to construct a typology of expert malpractice claims and to evaluate systematically the rationales offered for absolute immunity of testifying experts as applied to each type of claim. The Article concludes that absolute immunity against expert malpractice claims is in all cases either unwarranted, insofar as it does not serve the purposes of witness immunity, or unnecessary, insofar as existing tort and contract law serve adequately to prevent the undesirable outcomes that proponents of immunity identify while permitting injured plaintiffs to recover for experts' professional misconduct. Second, the Article offers guidance as to how expert malpractice liability should be implemented, proposing reforms to substantive state law as well as the Federal Rules of Evidence intended to accommodate the concerns raised by advocates of absolute immunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]