Approach to Procurement of Public Legal Services by Basic-Level Government

Basic-level governmental procurement of public legal services is a new supply of public legal services containing market rationality and efficiency. Exploring its type and approach can describe the current basic situation in China, so as to better respond to the needs of diverse public legal services. This paper attempts to classify the purchase approaches by establishing a descriptive framework and using cross-case clustering analysis. In this paper, the author finds that there are some problems in the purchase way, such as the fuzzy boundary of the purchased content, the narrow purchase scope, the lack of the whole consideration about regulated purchase, the insufficient discretionary purchase and the imbalance of the purchasing channels. Based on the above, this paper brings forward such policy recommendations as formulating the law to clarify the boundaries of purchase, system to clarify the content boundary, considering "publicness" to broaden the scope of purchase, constructing a working mechanism to coordinate the purchase, cultivating public confidence to guide the discretionary purchase, regulating public bidding and government subsidy and strengthening supervision to regulate the purchase of private relations.