New scientific developments, addressed throughout this book, which challenge the SBS hypothesis present challenges for courts that relied upon the outdated and unchallenged hypothesis to convict caregivers of child abuse. The law is notoriously slow to respond to scientific advances, and its strong fealty to finality makes reopening old convictions, even those that are dependent on flawed science, procedurally difficult. This chapter addresses the challenges posed for courts by shifting SBS science and analyses the bases, and slowly developing movement to reopen old SBS convictions based upon outdated and flawed science.

This chapter concerns the procedure for those rare but important civil disputes which proceed through the entire litigation process to judgment and, in some case, beyond. As this book has demonstrated, most cases settle prior to trial, which means that those cases which proceed through trial and on to judgment tend to be the ones with the most adversarial and persistent parties. However, for some cases, even judgment does not bring an end to proceedings. Judgments are considered final and enforceable as soon as they have been delivered, but they may also be incomplete and appealable and further disputes can arise after judgment. Appeals are a critical example of one of the key balancing themes in this book — being the balance between due process and efficiency.1 Appeals provide an opportunity to concentrate the hearing of the most legally difficult cases before the highest judges, which enables the development of high-level binding precedent by superior courts. However, appellate processes come at a high price for the efficiency aims of civil procedure as they require significant time and money.

I bring this book to a close with a reflection on constitutional time, and return to a phrase that continues to resonate in discussions of Hong Kong’s legal order: “remain unchanged for fifty years.” To “remain unchanged” is to engage in a suspension of time, to create a temporal hiatus whereby a system, an idea of who one is, and a way of life is preserved. I approach Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (released in 2004), in which a writer conjures up a place where nothing changes in the science fiction stories he creates, as an exploration of the potential finality of the Basic Law and Hong Kong identity, and of what it might mean to suspend time through a constitutional document.