Ma Xiwu

Ma Xiwu (1899-1962) was a Chinese judge and politician, a peasant cadre with no formal legal training who was named to lead a Chinese Communist-controlled border region's high court in 1946. He developed what became known as the Ma Xiwu adjudication method, which took court proceedings to villagers' own workplaces and homes and relied on informal mediation over rigid procedure, holding that the people's own sense of a dispute mattered more than a strict reading of the law; the approach spread across Chinese courts after the 1949 founding of the People's Republic.