Global climate change and consequent potential migration pose a number of challenges and are becoming increasingly important policy issues for Bangladesh. Therefore, policy responses need to deal with diverse issues, including sustainable development (SD), adaptation to climate change, and humanitarian assistance, to address the future challenges posed by climate change and consequent human displacement. There is no simple and straightforward solution to the challenges posed by climate-induced migration, and a “one-size-fits-all” approach will not effectively resolve the complex nature, and patterns, of population displacement. Rather than any single approach, a multifarious, comprehensive, proactive, and coherent policy approach is imperative for managing climate-induced migration in an orderly and humane manner. Based on the available data regarding the environment, climate change, and migration, this paper suggests a range of policy tools and approaches. It also sets out a road map showing how policy interventions could contribute to better integrating the full spectrum of migration issues and concerns into an overall environmental and developmental policy, and vice versa, within Bangladesh.

Post-1997 Hong Kong under the constitutional framework of “One Country Two Systems” has a political system that may be characterized as a “semi-democracy.” Hong Kong’s constitutional instrument—the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—provides that the ultimate goal of the evolution of Hong Kong’s political system is the election of its Chief Executive by universal suffrage. Since 2003, a democracy movement has developed in Hong Kong that campaigned for the speedy introduction of such universal suffrage. In 2007, the Chinese government announced that universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong may be introduced in 2017. In 2014, the Chinese government announced further details of the electoral model. The model was rejected by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council in 2015, with the result that the election of the Chief Executive in 2017 would not materialize. This article seeks to tell this story of Hong Kong’s quest for democratization, focusing particularly on the context and background of the “Occupy Central” Movement that emerged in 2013 and its aftermath. It suggests that the struggle for universal suffrage in the election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017 and the obstacles it faced reveal the underlying tensions behind, and the contradictions inherent in, the concept and practice of “One Country, Two Systems,” particularly the conflict between the Communist Party-led socialist political system in mainland China and the aspirations towards Western-style liberal democracy on the part of “pan-democrats” and their supporters in Hong Kong.

The indigenous and Fourth World communities in multiple Asian regions are again making noises. As the incoming ALSA president, I wish to offer a new perspective called the Fourth World Approaches to International Law (FWAIL) to understand the nature of pandemic indigenous people’s struggles for independence in Asia, to examine sociopolitical and historical roots of regional conflicts around many Asian peripheries, and to explore the contour of the social and political path for the recognition of indigenous rights for political sovereignty and independence under international law. Further, FWAIL is offered to give an active voice to indigenous people who have been victimized by predatory policies of the state system and international law, and to build a culture of collective resistance and opposition to hegemonic Western domination in the region. FWAIL also provides the framework to seek self-determination through activism, organizing, and negotiations with the state, in addition to the use of domestic law and international law. Furthermore, FWAIL is offered to give an alternative vision for the preservation of biodiversity and natural environment necessary for the survival of the human race in the coming generations in Asia.

Myanmar is the only Buddhism-majority country in the world that has developed and maintained a system of family law for Buddhists enforced by the courts. This article considers the construction of Burmese Buddhist law by lawyers, judges, and legislators, and the changes made through legislative intervention in 2015. It begins by addressing the creation and contestation of Burmese Buddhist law to demonstrate that it has largely been defined by men and by its perceived opposites, Hinduism and Islam. Three aspects of Burmese Buddhist law that affect women are then examined more closely. First, Burmese Buddhist law carries no penalties for men who commit adultery, although women may risk divorce and the loss of her property. Second, a man can take more than one wife under Burmese Buddhist law; a woman cannot. Third, restrictions on Buddhist women who marry non-Buddhist men operate to ensure the primacy of Burmese Buddhist law over the potential application of Islamic law. This article deconstructs the popular claim that women are better off under Burmese Buddhist law than under Hindu law or Islamic law by showing how Burmese Buddhist law has been preoccupied with regulating the position of women. The 2015 laws build on this history of Burmese Buddhist law, creating new problems, but also potentially operating as a new source of revenge.

Unlike Western common-law jurisdictions where plea bargaining has been acknowledged, official discourse in Hong Kong denies the existence of plea bargaining. However, defence lawyers are staunch supporters of its use behind the scenes. Using in-depth, semi-structured interviews with Hong Kong criminal defence lawyers, it was found that lawyers’ justifications are based on four main grounds: it is non-coercive because the final decision is left to the accused; negotiations avoid the risks of trials; plea bargaining is a practical solution that is in the best interests of the client and the state; and the courts implicitly tolerate the practice. The findings can be explained by Eisenstein and Jacob’s (1991) courtroom workgroup model. The present study seeks to bridge the gap in the literature where plea bargaining has only been discussed predominately in the context of Western common-law jurisdictions.

The world can no longer deny that the planet is on the verge of an Anthropocene catastrophe. As scientists from different fields and from around the globe are discussing the causes, impacts, challenges, and solutions to the arrival of this human-induced new geological time, the field of law cannot remain behind. Rights of Nature (RoN), granting legal personhood to nature and its elements such as rivers, is an emerging transnational legal framework fast gaining international traction among Euro-American legal scholars as a new tool to combat environmental destruction. Grounded in reflections derived from long-term collaborative ethnographic work among indigenous communities, this article aims to critically and empirically unpack several interrelated concerns and blind spots at this moment of the RoN snowballing effect around the globe related to claims that this new legal proposal is rooted in indigenous lifestyles and views about nature/the environment.

This article describes and critiques the judicial reasoning of Indonesia’s Supreme Court, through the lens of the Court’s reviews of subnational laws during 2011–17. The resulting picture is a negative one. Most of the Court’s decisions were critically flawed, with either very little or no reasoning, and inconsistencies with past decisions. Worse, the Court appears keen to avoid hearing important cases that raise difficult political issues, even though the law governing those issues is clear and easy to apply. These inadequacies are perpetuated by genuine uncertainty about the precise jurisdiction of the Court in judicial review cases. However, the Court has not sought to resolve this uncertainty. Indeed, these decisions appear to reflect a court paying little regard to judicial transparency and accountability, and unwilling or unable to act as an effective check on government power.

This article argues that two types of pressure, specifically pressure from international competition and pressure resulting from the low employment rate of law graduates, are the major motivations for the new wave of legal education reforms in China. The direction of the reforms is from a single model into more diversified models. However, there is tension between “the universities’ pursuit of academic freedom and featured education” and “the government’s focal investment associated with deliberation and calculation.” In recent years, Chinese legal education reform has placed more and more emphasis on practical skills training, and Chinese law schools are now required to open legal practice courses that must make up no less than 15% of the curricula. The author thinks this developmental trend is correct, but points to a potential problem: the costs of practical skills training, historically borne by mostly courts, procuratorates, and law firms, are now being transferred to law schools. Therefore, reform of the legal education sector in China should be adopted together with reforms in the tuition and fees system, as well as the bar exam, so that planned changes can be applied outside of the academic sector.

The singularity of artificial intelligence (AI), which transcends human intelligence to play the role of God, is imminent. In this context, the Chinese judicial system has gained some latecomer advantage, with the help of information technology, the Internet, big data, cloud computing, and AI to improve the efficiency and transparency of case handling. The trial process has undergone extensive and profound qualitative mutations. This represents a challenge to the institutional arrangements of the modern rule of law. At this stage, we should adopt a cautious and prudent attitude towards the design and application of legal-expert systems as well as machine learning. Especially from the aspect of computer sentencing, it is even more necessary to avoid a rush for quick results, and there is no need to completely exclude the judge’s discretion and free evaluation of the evidence through inner conviction. The finality of the judicial power is destined to choose a correct final solution through a debate on the survival of the fittest mechanism. In the face of such a modern rule-of-law system, big data, cloud computing, information technology, and AI are just auxiliary means to achieve legal justice. It is impossible to put the cart before the horses. This is a basic principle that we should always bear in mind.

This article explores whether and how labour law matters in factory workers’ grievances and demands in their letters sent to the unions and state authorities in Đồng Nai Province, an industrial hub in the south of Vietnam. An examination of the letters demonstrates that the legalistic language of rights and other provisions in the Labour Code plays little role in shaping workers’ accounts. A majority of letter writers instead referred to moral aspects of subsistence, reciprocity, and their subjective views of fairness to make their claims. Yet the moral constructions of workers’ claims may overlap and derive from values imbricated within the Labour Code. These observations raise the need to consider the subtle way in which law generates workers’ resistance against management and/or the state, as well as the fluid boundary between law and morality in workers’ narratives of (in)justice.

Although the legality of equity-based crowdfunding was determined from a judicial point of view in the “first crowdfunding financing case” in 2015, there is no formal law, regulation, or rule released to regulate the crowdfunding financing. From a micro-perspective, determining the nature and workings of equity-based crowdfunding are two preconditions for determining the legal framework for and supervision of equity-based crowdfunding. The “Open, Public, Small-sum” characteristics defined the nature of public offering to the equity-based crowdfunding; therefore, it should be distinguished from private equity financing as a different category of online equity financing. Based on the original purpose of “financing facility” and the nature of “grassroots finance,” fundraisers shall enjoy exemptions on small sums, and the threshold of investors shall also be appropriately restricted, while the intermediary platform shall be the regulatory focus. From a macro point of view, the supervision of equity-based crowdfunding should seek a balance between “financial innovation” and “risk control.” Equity-based crowdfunding should not simply be considered a financing method. Rather, its positive effects on mass entrepreneurship and innovation should be emphasized so as to make it a particularly important “booster” to promote economic and social development.

This paper revisits the concept of critical legal pluralism, which treats the individual as a site of normativity with the capacity to create legal knowledge. To help operationalize the usage of critical legal pluralism, I propose a methodological approach that places the individual’s ability to makes choices along a continuum. On one side of continuum, legal pluralism can be viewed as facilitating fully discrete choices that ascribe to one legal order or another. On the other side, the ability to make individual choices is curtailed because of the presence of a hegemonic legal order. This simple continuum helps to shed light on the complex considerations that affect individual choices, which in turn affect how various legal orders are legitimated. The paper then considers how critical legal pluralism can enrich the discussion on the legal system of Afghanistan, focusing on interviews with two Afghan justice actors: a former judge and an active defence lawyer.

Fintech risks have a special type of structure and formation mechanism; regular updates and a complete financial legal system are needed to implement an effective legal governance. China’s fintech development is leading the world, but its lagging legal development does not match its rank in the field. Due to the difficult co-ordination of regulatory goals, unclear allocation of regulatory power, insufficient risk identification, and incomplete regulation tools, China’s legal governance on fintech risks has been swinging between the paths of suppressive, indulging, and adaptive regulation. It is urgently necessary to follow the fintech-risk law and fully tap into the local resources and explore the intervening path with more proactivity, foresight, and refined characteristics, through specification of the legal status and governing power of the intervening entity, the institutional basis and legal effect of interventional means, and the governing key and constitutional rules of intervening objects, to establish a legal-governance system on fintech risks that is innovation-friendly, regulatorily effective, and safe at the bottom line, fully covering the whole process.

In this Introduction, Indonesia’s approach towards refugee protection is contextualized historically and regionally in light of the enactment of Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR). In particular, we describe the legal and policy framework for refugee protection in Indonesia and analyze its underlying norms and values, including the constitutional right to asylum. We explain how the legal framework competes with Law No. 6 of 2011 on Immigration, which facilitates a discretionary, securitized, and ‘humanitarian’ approach to refugee policy, which is inconsistent with Indonesia’s legal responsibilities. In conclusion, we assess both the challenges and opportunities provided by the PR.

This article takes up Talal Asad’s suggestion that studies of law and religion should reject the modern/non-modern binary and instead consider the “fragmented cultures” and “hybrid selves” associated with constantly changing social circumstances. The article begins with a seemingly bizarre incident that occurred during Thai street protests in March 2010. Tens of thousands of rural demonstrators splashed their own blood on Bangkok’s public buildings to curse the ruling government and its legal and political institutions. An explanation of the demonstrators’ controversial actions is found in their reaction against efforts of the central Thai ruling elite over the past century to modernize Thai law, rationalize its religious administration, and eliminate rival systems in outlying regions. These efforts, in turn, are placed in the context of a centuries-old tradition of law, kingship, and religious purification through which Thai rulers centralized their power and demonstrated their legitimacy. The street protests in 2010 represented a failed attempt by rural workers simultaneously to claim their place in the Thai nation and to challenge its hegemony, to assert their rights under modern law, and to invoke pre-modern legal norms and identities.

Globalization is rapidly changing the landscape of law practice in China, especially its corporate legal sector. This article reports on the preliminary findings of the China research of the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) Project—a comparative study that examines how globalization is reshaping the market for legal services in important emerging economies and how these developments are contributing to the transformation of the political economy in these countries and beyond. Adopting an ecological approach, which examines how different segments of the legal system interact with one another in complex ways, this article maps the corporate core, international linkages, and domestic contexts of China’s globalizing corporate legal sector and discusses its impact on lawyers and society.

This paper looks at the relationship between personhood and the state by taking a relational perspective both on the concept of personhood and on that of the state, and with a focus on social security. It presents a broad concept of social security. Based on research in the Moluccas of East Indonesia, and among Moluccan migrants in the Netherlands, it is explained how social security shapes personhood in situations in which the state is only a minor contributor, and people depend on mechanisms other than support and care from the state. Finally, it will be explored how long-distance relations of social security are maintained and how the position that respective actors have within these relationships affects notions not only of appropriate care, but also of personhood.

Mobile payment generally refers to transactions made through the applications of a portable electronic gadget without the transfer of cash. As one of the most disruptive technologies for finance, mobile payment has been rapidly transforming the traditional financial industry. While it brings important benefits, there are also various risks, in terms of liquidity, security, and data privacy, that call for adequate regulatory responses. As a global financial centre, Hong Kong has gradually established a regulatory framework for mobile payment, addressing the relevant risks with rules on payment and privacy. However, there is still room for further improvement, in terms of measures to deal with cybersecurity issues and strengthen the protection of personal data. The Hong Kong experiences suggest that, to regulate a new and fast-growing industry such as mobile payment, the regulatory regime needs to be improved continuously to alleviate the risk concerns, so as to enhance the protection of financial consumers and society at large.

This introduction to the special issue on Buddhism and law lays out an agenda for the socio-legal study of contemporary Buddhism. We identify lacunae in the current literature and call for further work on four themes: the relations between monastic legal practice and state law; the formations of Buddhist constitutionalism; Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation; and Buddhist moral critiques of law. We argue that this agenda is important for advancing Buddhist studies and for the comparative study of law and legal institutions.

Taiwanese legal education is undergoing transformation and diversification. While the traditional approach to legal education has produced legal professionals who have led civil rights movements and contributed to the democratization of Taiwan, it has failed to meet the challenges of today’s world. Under globalization, Taiwanese industries and society now require lawyers capable of solving transnational legal disputes and legal issues regarding developments in technology and changes in society. However, these new challenges also provide law schools in Taiwan with an opportunity to apply experimental approaches, to innovate legal education. This essay describes the past and present state of legal education in Taiwan, especially its development since the government’s failed attempt at reform. Furthermore, it introduces the successful example of National Chiao Tung University’s Law School—a new law school that has developed a creative model of “innovation hub” and “social enterprise” that is transforming Taiwan’s legal education.