Informal social sanctions such as ostracism are the primary means of controlling deviance in communities. Formal legal sanctions are a costly back-up. Yet outside of university laboratories, studies of ostracism barely exist. We examine legal cases brought by targets of ostracism in Japan, encompassing nearly all the non-trivial reported opinions. The cases do not involve villagers who actually offended their community. Instead, most plaintiffs are victims of opportunistic ostracism, where ostracism is used to extort property, hide community-wide malfeasance, or harass rivals. We explore carefully the non-random character of the disputes and provide a formal model in the annex. We conclude that typical plaintiffs in these lawsuits are not seeking to harness the government's coercive power. Instead, they bring suit for the informational role of courts, aiming to have the court publicly certify that they did not misbehave, contrary to what ostracism might be thought to imply. This analysis contributes to the growing body of legal scholarship on social norms and the role of the courts as informational intermediaries.

Ouster clauses have perennially borne the mantle of a ‘litigation minefield’, where clashes between legislative and judicial powers unfold in open fora. Recent jurisprudential advancements in the United Kingdom and Singapore demonstrate how judicial approaches to ouster clauses can evolve in the face of constitutional developments. Hong Kong has, however, remained muted while these jurisprudential advancements bear fruit in other parts of the common law world, notwithstanding the fact that its constitutional framework, umpired by the Basic Law, has been in existence for over twenty-five years. This article argues for the need to reconceptualise approaches to ouster clauses in Hong Kong, grounded firmly in its post-1997 constitutional framework. Drawing on comparative jurisprudence, it presents a spectrum of approaches, animated by the dynamic interplay between various ‘macrocontextual’ and ‘microcontextual’ factors, ranging from a localised version of Anisminic, remedial interpretation, and invalidation of ouster clauses on the grounds that they impermissibly affront the constitutional right of access to courts, allocation of judicial power, and constitutional supremacy.

In many African countries with hegemonic-party or de facto one-party systems, political leaders have historically exploited ostensibly proper constitutional amendments to undermine constitutionalism, a practice raising questions about the legitimacy, or lack thereof, of such amendments. This article argues that amendment legitimacy is contingent on achieving ‘broad consensus’, a concept endorsed by the African Charter on Democracy, Elections and Governance. Traditional amendment procedures, such as supermajorities and referendums, while crucial, have proven to be imperfect proxies for ensuring such broad consensus. To more effectively safeguard the core constitutional rules of democratic governance, this article contends that political parties must be recognised as key sites of power division and checks and balances. Accordingly, constitutional amendment procedures should require some level of cross-party approval for key amendments, thus preventing individual political groups, regardless of their dominance, from unilaterally altering fundamental rules of the game. This approach would not only enhance the legitimacy of amendments but also serve as a safeguard against contemporary forms of democratic backsliding, where incumbents exploit formal processes to undermine democratic competition. While this process might make constitutional changes more difficult, it would apply only to a narrow set of fundamental aspects of constitutional democracy. Moreover, it does not necessarily conflict with popular self-governance (and its majoritarian expression), but instead calls for an inclusive re-imagining of majoritarianism.

This article examines India's journey towards a cross-border insolvency regime and its draft law on cross-border insolvency. The article analyses the areas of convergence and divergence between India's draft law and the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and identifies the factors behind the divergences. The article concludes that the implementation of a cross-border insolvency regime is crucial for India to ensure coordination in cross-border insolvency proceedings and thereby attract foreign investment. The analysis of the reasons behind the divergences suggests that four areas of divergence are particularly relevant: the structure of existing legal institutions; the reciprocity requirement; restrictions on the rights of access of foreign representatives; and the historical practice of the Indian courts to follow the principle of territorialism. The success of the Indian cross-border insolvency regime will very much depend on the ability of the adjudicating authorities to overcome territorialism and embrace the principle of modified universalism.

This article critically analyses the substantial inadequacies of the current Customer Due Diligence (CDD) framework in safeguarding marginalised communities from financial exclusion in Malaysia. It highlights that for vulnerable groups such as rural inhabitants, undocumented migrants, and refugees, the CDD, as currently framed and applied, only impedes access to formal financial services. While Malaysia's implementation of a risk-based approach in CDD policies complies with global standards of CDD, this article argues that these standards fall far short of effectively helping marginalised communities. In addition, there is evidence that banks are exhibiting over-cautious compliance behaviour, which resulted in banks hesitating to implement some of the CDD flexibilities introduced by the regulators. In order to address these problems and overcome the barriers, proposals for the development of new CDD strategies are analysed. These include reducing documentation requirements, widening the list of acceptable documents, and introducing entry-level accounts. The aim is to address banking access issues for marginalised communities without compromising the regulatory objectives of CDD. The article recommends that CDD regulations can better assist financial inclusion if they are tailored to the specific needs of the excluded communities by using a risk-based approach.

In the past, Malaysian courts performing constitutional rights review played a merely clerical role, applying a test that was trivially easy for legislation to pass. Then a more rigorous proportionality test took root. However, the Federal Court in the 2020 case of Letitia Bosman whittled the test down again, and the courts once more played a minimal role in checking state action. The reasons for this cannot be explained merely by diversity in judicial philosophy or political contextual factors. Rather, the near-demise of proportionality (and, with it, robust constitutional review) was made possible by a lack of a clear sense of the doctrinal foundations of proportionality (and, indeed, of constitutional rights review generally), and the relative roles of the courts and the legislature therein. As a result, there is a risk that the courts’ important role in safeguarding constitutional rights has been minimised to near vanishing point. This article aims, through an analysis of the case law and its foundations, to explain how this came to be, and hence highlight important issues which Malaysian constitutional law must grapple with if meaningful rights review is to take place.

‘Anxious scrutiny’ has become one of the most used terms within the lexicon of judicial review throughout the common law world, including Hong Kong, yet surprisingly remains understudied in the scholarly literature. In contrast to the considerable body of literature on substantive review of discretion in relation to proportionality and Wednesbury unreasonableness as rival standards of review, there is still much to explore in relation to the foundation, purpose, and techniques of anxious scrutiny review, including how the concept may have come to depart from its English roots in other common law jurisdictions. Using Hong Kong as a case study, this article examines how anxious scrutiny has been received in an Asian common law jurisdiction, considering both the scope of application and the techniques used by judges under this standard. Through a detailed examination of the case law, it traces the origins and evolution of the standard and its future role within the sliding scale of substantive review within Hong Kong's system of public law.

In English law, the trust's third-party and bankruptcy effects contribute significantly to its wide use in commercial transactions. In view of the trust's attractiveness in conducting commercial dealings, China has also introduced the trust model into its domestic legal system to enhance its financial infrastructure. However, given the extent to which Chinese law has been influenced by the Roman-Germanic tradition, China's replication of the trust's third-party and bankruptcy effects has encountered doctrinal obstacles. Drawing upon the experience of its Northeast Asian forerunners, China has established two mechanisms to achieve the third-party and bankruptcy effects: the regime of trust fund independence and the granting of the right of rescission to beneficiaries. These two mechanisms represent the adjustments made by Chinese legislators in the process of transplanting the trust model into the Chinese legal context. Adopting a comparative law perspective, this article examines these mechanisms in the Chinese law setting for two reasons: first, to explore the mechanisms’ constituent elements and their operation, as well as the roles of both mechanisms in the Chinese trust law system; and second, to furnish comparative law scholarship with broader insights into rule transplantation and reconciliation.

A persistent issue in the Indian criminal justice system has been the over-incarceration of pre-trial detainees, which is inextricably linked with the practices of trial courts in deciding on the detention and release of accused persons pending trial. The present statutory law and judicial discourse provides little guidance on the process for deciding bail matters. There has also not been much effort to empirically research decision-making in such matters and/or the impact of these decisions on the pre-trial detainee population in prisons. The present study is an attempt to plug this gap, analysing ‘regular’ bail orders of Sessions Courts of Delhi available from the eCourts system between 2017 and 2019 for the offences of theft and rape. The data reveals a failure to recognise the fundamentally preventive purpose of bail, as well as to develop individualised and specialised processes in compliance with this purpose. Such failure in guidance has resulted in judges importing factors from the trial process that remain unjustified outside of the punitive detention process, such as guilt. In conclusion, we argue that a fundamental reimagination of the approach to bail is required – one that is distinct from the trial process and focuses instead on the individualised assessment of risk.