Recent controversy around comfort women litigation in Korea illustrates the perplexity of dealing with colonial issues within the framework of international law. A number of victims filed two lawsuits against Japan, requesting compensation for the damages caused in the comfort station. In both lawsuits, the key issue was whether the court should dismiss the case on the grounds of state immunity. Surprisingly, the two courts reached opposite conclusions. The first judgment rejected Japan’s claim of state immunity and announced that the Korean court still holds jurisdiction over the case, while the second judgment dismissed the case by reason of customary international law. Although contrary in conclusion, the rationale of both judgments reflects theoretical confusion about applying the principle of state immunity to an incident that happened between a state and its colony. In neither lawsuits was there an issue of how to represent the damages induced by colonial mobilization. Instead, all the litigants focused on the issue of state immunity. However, since the principle of state immunity is a norm applied between equivalent sovereign states, it does not easily apply to the problems arising from colonial relations. Korea was annexed to Japan as an “incorporated but unequal” part. While the issue was the systematic rape committed against the women in the colony, the identity of Korean comfort women was ambivalent - they were not combatants of the enemy state, but were practically seen as a constituent member of the Japanese military.

In this article, I will analyze the discourse in the lawsuits that reveal the deficiency of jurisprudence in Korea regarding how to address the issue of coloniality. By comparing the two decisions that are opposite and yet similar, I explore how the formalist discussion regarding state immunity veiled substantive issues relevant to the court. Finally, I suggest the possibility of an alternative framework for how the law might accept and address the ambivalent colonial identities of victims, drawing on the International Criminal Court’s Ntaganda case.

This paper explores the reasons that divorce petitions by trafficked women in China were denied in courts in the wake of the chained woman incident. The author collected and examined divorce verdicts involving trafficked women from China Judgements Online. Among 100 unique cases, 87 were denied in their first attempts. Most of these cases were treated in the same way as regular divorce cases, with trafficking allegations either blatantly ignored or dismissed as irrelevant. The author argues that the systematic denials and ignoring of trafficking allegations is enabled by a hegemonic legal consciousness within the Circuit of Trafficking that includes not only parties directly engaged in trafficking activities, but also state actors such as the judges and legislators who prioritise “family” preservation and social stability over the rights and well-being of trafficked women. Without addressing and changing this hegemonic legal consciousness, any reform, if it should take place, would be rendered futile in practice.

This paper engages in a comprehensive analysis of the historical processes leading to the destruction of the Original Nations of Belarus and Latvia. The research is structured in three sections, with the first outlining the tribal roots common to both Latvian and Belarusian nations, serving as a foundation for subsequent analyses. The second section constitutes the core of the research, employing an Original Nation approach to dissect the impact of historic occupations in the five key waves—religious conversion, invasions of the Mongol-Tatar Yoke that led to administrative integration into states, a language push under the Russian Empire, identity erasure during Sovietization, and lastly, the restoration of independence in both countries. The last section surveys the modern states of Belarus and Latvia, emphasising their endeavours to revive their Original Nations, as both nations share the burden of recovering lost national elements, resisting cultural repression, and building a robust national identity.

The dispute of married out women has become an important modernisation problem since the 1990s as the result of urbanisation and industrialisation. It concerns social stability at grassroots that may affect the ruling base. While the Chinese government is constantly striving to solve it, it also shows how deficient the protection of women’s property rights is that it causes so many controversies. Currently, the cultural explanation that simply attributes the phenomenon to traditional patriarchal culture is popular among scholars and widely accepted, which is, however, proved to be misleading. This article attempts to break this stereotype and points out that this trouble is not directly related to Chinese traditional culture. Rather, it is caused by the majority’s tyranny under the current villager self-government and collective property rights. This article also attempts to find possible solutions, requiring improving the rural self-government system and clearly defining the boundaries of collective property rights by law.

This inaugural presidential address of the Asian Law and Society Association features three recently published monographs to draw attention to research by the next generation of scholars and to show how they contribute to the field. Although the three books differ in terms of focus, methods, and findings, they share a hallmark of law and society, that is, they investigate practices, beliefs, and objects that are often taken for granted. At the same time, the three studies arrive at dissimilar conclusions about law, which reflects another unifying hallmark of law and society—its diversity. Together, the inconsistent findings expose the many profiles of law and demonstrate its fascinating nature. They remind us that we do not yet know the intricacies of law, and we need all kinds of law and society scholarships—on Asian societies and elsewhere—to continue advancing the field.