ALSA 2025 meeting

Is there any possible for us to have a democratic dispute resolution system, even in the cyberspace? In this paper, I draw on cases of several Chinese online platforms to suggest that democracy enhances the inclusivity of a dispute resolution system, significantly improving autonomy and identity of the community members. When state law fails to cope with the exploding number of online disputes, a new dispute resolution mechanism within online platforms has emerged. It lets ordinary platform members participate in dispute resolution by inviting them to vote on disputes, the process express their common belief about how should they build the shared community which constitute the legitimacy within platforms. This is an important challenge to the traditional resolution structures which are led by educated elites and professional officials rather than community mass. Although such democratic dispute resolution process can not guarantee a relatively high level of fairness in the outcome as traditional judicial process, it enables the ordinary members of the platform to dynamically lead the dispute resolution and integrate their own beliefs and ideas into the implementation of the platform's adjudicative rules, thus reconstructing both hegemony and legitimacy at epistemic level. This emerging non-state private dispute resolution allows us reconsider the value of inclusivity and autonomy in ODR context.