Conflict among Thailand’s legal advocates for popular causes over the legitimacy of Thailand’s two twenty-first-century coups raises questions about the meaning of the rule of law. The general perception of inexorable globalization of an international interpretation of the rule of law and of cause lawyers as one of its important vectors runs counter to the experience of developing societies where rule of law is being adapted to the meaning of nation and individual identities informing everyday lives and the relationship between a society and its government. This essay uses career narratives of Thai cause lawyers to illustrate this point by examining sources of the rule of law’s meaning, including experiences shared by each generation of cause lawyers and communities of practice shaping individual careers and identities. Their career narratives suggest the importance of continuing relationships with social movement leaders on beliefs about Thailand’s readiness for democracy and meaning of a rule of law.

This essay explores the extent to which Thailand’s secular legal system reinforces the imagined divide, common in Thai Buddhist conceptions of society, between a “worldly” sphere and the “religious” sphere of the sangha (order of monks). It asks: How far does secular Thai law exclude clergy from the “unmonkly” domains of politics and commerce? It shows that there is a striking discrepancy between the systematic way in which secular Thai law has kept monks from formally participating in “politics” and the rather more permissive way in which it has facilitated participation by the monkhood in the sphere of “commerce.” The essay concludes with some reflections on this finding and the questions it raises.

Using a socioeconomic rights framework, this article will evaluate government policy relating to housing welfare in Hong Kong. In particular, it will explore the alarming plight of cage tenants in Hong Kong, a highly marginalized group estimated to be as many as 200,000 in number, who live day to day in cramped, dank dwellings averaging 15 square feet in size. It will argue that current government policies are incompatible with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It will further look at strategies for domesticating these international human rights treaties. In doing so, this article will contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the legal nature of socioeconomic rights.

The market of a successful financial centre must be efficient, orderly, and fair, which requires that investor protection rules be enforced effectively. While a substantial literature exists promoting privately driven enforcement of investor protection rules, there is a growing consensus that enforcement action by public bodies is likely to be more important for most markets than privately initiated litigation. Hong Kong exemplifies this point. In Hong Kong, public authorities carry almost the entire burden of enforcing corporate and securities laws. Yet Hong Kong functions at a high level of quality globally despite operating a market in which most companies are foreign-incorporated—often originating from jurisdictions with reputations for governance that are middling at best—and trading takes place in multiple currencies. To revisit the debate on the determinants of effective corporate and securities law enforcement, this paper evaluates the enforcement of investor protection laws in Hong Kong. The paper first examines the institutional context, presenting key corporate and securities regulation and explaining avenues for private and public actions. It looks at the powers and competencies of the relevant supervisory authorities, including the stock exchange, which has a quasi-public role in regulating the market. Then, using publicly available data supplemented through interviews with agency staff, the paper presents Hong Kong’s enforcement “inputs” (funding and staffing) and “outputs” (actions and sanctions) for the main public enforcers. We find evidence that the Hong Kong public enforcement model effectively disciplines even its dangerous environment of foreign companies, controlling shareholders, and complex, international groups, and might be able better to do so exactly because of a focus on public, rather than private, enforcement.

This article analyzes the ambitious Case Quality Assessment System (CQAS) that the Supreme People’s Court of China (SPC) promoted during the first half of the 2010s. It offers a case-study of Court J, a grassroots court located in an affluent urban metropolis of China that struggled to come out ahead in the CQAS competition. The article discusses how the SPC quantified judging and the problems created by the metricization process. The CQAS project is analyzed as a case of metric fixation. By identifying the problems that doomed the CQAS, the article points out the challenges facing the authoritarian regime in subjecting good judging to quantitative output standards. The CQAS is a metric that judges judging. It reveals how judging is viewed by the party-state. The article concludes by discussing the legacy of the CQAS. Though it nominally ended in 2014, key indicators that it introduced for supervising judges are still used by the Chinese courts today. The CQAS presaged the growing centralization that the Chinese judicial system is undergoing today. Though the SPC has terminated the tournament-style competition that defined the CQAS, the metric remains the template used to evaluate judging.

A central aspect of Thai legal consciousness since the mid-twentieth century, widely shared among the general population, has been a perception that judges have an exalted status entitling them to make broad-ranging pronouncements about social and political issues as well as legal matters. Popular legal consciousness of the Thai judge has to a large extent been shared by the judges themselves, as well as by their families and followers. The power and authority of Thai judges go far beyond the limited formal role they are given in Thailand’s civil-law system. This article suggests that the exceptional status of the Thai judge derives from a process of identity construction, emphasizing four traits that set the ideal judge apart from ordinary people. The first is that a Thai judge must be a “khon di” (good person), with specific reference to the traditions of Thai Buddhism. The second is that a Thai judge must be polite, kind, and socially refined—a “phudi” (proper gentleman). The third characteristic of the ideal Thai judge is that he or she must be highly educated and knowledgeable about the law—a “phuru” (learned and wise person). The fourth trait is that a Thai judge must be a “phupakdi” (loyal servant of the king), not only loyal to the monarchy as an institution, but to the late King Rama IX as a person. When the identity of the Thai judge is constructed from these four constituent elements, the pronouncements of the judge acquire legitimacy, even when they range beyond the narrow letter of the law. The article explores this central aspect of Thai legal consciousness by analyzing the construction of judges’ identities through a distinctive set of historical documents—the cremation volumes (nangsue ngan sop) that are published and distributed at the funerals of noted public figures. These volumes contain a wealth of biographical information as well as related legal and historical material that shed light on the life and work of Thailand’s most prominent judges during the past 50 years.

The present paper reviews some conclusions deriving from a series of works by a historian of medieval Western law and justice who has applied comparative analysis to the Chinese world. It points to the distance between the two civilizations, in terms of the concept of a “debt of justice” owed by the state, the autonomy of the judicial power, and judicial ethics. It opens a debate on the cultural elements that define the judicial truth-making process in various legal systems.

In this paper, I want to focus on some aspects of the political process in India that have an impact on the treatment of religious minorities. Much of the discussion on multicultural jurisdictions deals with differentiated citizenship rights that allow religious groups to maintain their normative universe. This literature shows the tensions surrounding individual and group rights. I want to approach the question of religious freedom from a rather different angle. I want to first focus on the protection of bare life in the face of religious violence and then examine the issue of conversion from one religion to another. The issues of human security and conversion are linked in India, since Hindu nationalists see Muslims as forcibly converted Hindus who should be reconverted. To highlight the importance of majoritarian nationalism rather than political systems in the treatment of religious minorities, I offer a brief comparison with China.

This is an overview article regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential normative implications. Technology has always had inherent normative consequences not least due to AI and the use of algorithms. There is a crucial difference between algorithms in a technical sense and from a social-science perspective. It is a question of different orders of normativity—the first related to the algorithm as a technical instruction and the second to the consequences springing from the first order. I call these last-mentioned norms algo norms. These are embedded in the technology and determined by the design of the AI. The outcome is an empirical question. AI and algo norms are moving targets, which call for a novel scientific approach that relates to advanced practice. Law actualizes primarily for preventive reasons in relation to negative aspects of the new technology. No major regulatory scheme for AI exists. In the article, I point out some areas that raise the need for legal regulation. Finally, I comment on three main challenges for the digital development in relation to AI: (1) the energy costs; (2) the singularity point; and (3) the governance problems.

China faces a number of important financial-stability risks. A persistent feature of the Chinese banking sector is the rapid formation of non-performing loans (NPLs) during each business cycle. Moreover, lending restrictions and interest-rate caps (“financial repression”) have, in part, given rise to an ever-expanding shadow-banking sector. The article highlights five cardinal sins within the Chinese financial system: (1) bad lending practices by the regulated sector, (2) lax governance, (3) a shadow-banking system that is dominated by short-term claims with no liquidity backstop, (4) stark lack of transparency in the shadow sector, and (5) very high levels of interconnectedness between the shadow and the regulated sector. The article suggests that some of these problems will be alleviated through a regulatory big bang that would abolish the current silo approach to financial regulation streamlining financial stability and conduct/consumer-protection supervision. Furthermore, we recommend the introduction of a binding and all-encompassing leverage ratio that will require banks to hold much higher capital buffers as a means to boost bank resilience, reduce NPLs, and battle interconnectedness with the shadow sector.

This article begins with an account of the contexts surrounding China’s “Good Samaritan’s Dilemma”—the fear of civil liabilities as a result of a rescue attempt. It highlights how a notorious hit-and-run case in 2011 has prompted several provinces to consider Good Samaritan law—legislation aimed at encouraging altruism. In light of diverse opinions over the pros and cons of Good Samaritan law, it considers whether law should have a role to play in shaping moral behaviours. On the basis that the law has been on the books for as long as over a century in much of the Western world and parts of East Asia, this article explores how overseas experience may provide insights to China in its adaptation of Good Samaritan law. It concludes that, in China’s case, a non-punitive regime that seeks to protect and compensate Good Samaritans may help encourage the proverbial Chinese bystanders to be altruistic neighbours.

Against the background of increasing social diversification in a market economy, this paper examines the challenges confronting China’s existing power structure and system of authority. Both to overcome the legitimation crisis of ruling and to achieve a soft landing of the political reform depend on reconstructing the authority of the rule of law through judicial reform as the breakthrough point. For this very reason, the top-level design of regime transition can follow a two-step strategy of building a rule of law country first, to be followed by restructuring power, so as to achieve democracy via the rule of law. It also proposes a conception to institutionalize the rule of law, emphasizing that the alternative three-review mechanism is both necessary and feasible, in that a top-level design of judicial review can contribute to our strivings for judicial fairness, an implementation of budget review and accountability review at the grassroots level for fiscal democracy, and the synergy of high-level and grassroots powers for a virtuous circle between the rule of law authority and democratic polity in mutual enhancement. There also comes the moment for plural efforts to both drive and achieve the rule of law based on the three-review mechanism.

This article addresses the right to strike in the context of the new Labour Code and amended Trade Union Law of Vietnam.1 It analyses major problems posed today by wildcat strikes in Vietnam’s private sector. It argues that the ongoing approaches of the Vietnamese government and its social partners in strike resolution are ineffective and inconsistent with International Labour Standards. Finally, it suggests a model for the prevention and settlement of such strikes.

How does an intellectual property (IP) legal regime affect those who make their living on counterfeit commodities, and in return how do these people respond to the implementation of IP laws? In this ethnographic study, I analyze the effects of an IP legal regime in two Chinese markets, and use legal consciousness theories and methods to show how this legal regime results in greater social inequality. While the majority of business owners in my study engage in counterfeiting, their tactics in response to the enforcement of IP laws vary significantly. Small shopkeepers at one market, the primary target of enforcement, adopt the legal consciousness of resistance. Established trademark and logo owners at the other market adopt tactics of evasion to maintain the appearance of lawful practices. I argue that these two types of tactics embody different forms of legal consciousness. The divergent tactical responses strengthen the second group of business owners who have greater power and resources at the expense of the first group who have less, thus aggravating their socioeconomic disparities.

This article highlights the convenient excuse of (il)legality used by (1) religious majoritarian mobs to justify attacks against places of worship and religious buildings of minorities; and (2) police and local authorities to absolve themselves of the failure to uphold public order and the rule of law, protect religious minorities, and to punish religious minorities. This article traces the emergence of legal violence in the form of anti-mosque vigilante extremism in Myanmar from 2012 onwards and analyzes cases of attacks against: (1) “illegal” mosques; (2) madrasas being used as or reconstructed into mosques; (3) buildings allegedly being constructed as mosques; (4) private homes and public spaces being used as mosques; and cases of (5) closed mosques not being allowed to reopen. The author primarily used Myanmar-language resources as well as interviews to conduct the research.

T. H. Marshall’s 1950 seminal work shows that the granting of civil, political, and social rights leads to the institutionalization of rules binding the state and its citizens. In practice, however, citizenship goes beyond these unproblematized paternalistic relations. It is political, involving connection, competition, and conflicts. Isin and Turner (2002) propose that “citizenship” should be examined through its extent (norms of inclusion and exclusion), content (rights and responsibility), and depth (citizens’ perceived relation to their political community). In Indonesia, the discrimination against members of minority religions by Islamic conservative groups is among the main issues in politics. This article therefore examines the ambiguity between the constitutionally embraced “religious freedom” and the everyday discriminatory practices of conservative groups. Taking the case-studies of the sectarian campaign against a Chinese-Christian governor, the blasphemy sentence of a Chinese-Buddhist woman, and the persecution of the Ahmadiyah and Syiah, I argue that conservative groups have practised a “segregated citizenship” that prioritizes the values and interests of the majority religion against those of both the “accepted” and the “unaccepted” minority religions.

This article critically evaluates the interplay among courts with constitutional jurisdiction in Asia. This is done in the specific context of the Association of Asian Constitutional Courts and Equivalent Institutions (AACC). The article finds that the AACC has to date made only a nominal contribution to cultivating inter-court relations in furtherance of common goals and advances the claim that its members ought to rectify this state of affairs. On the one hand, transnational judicial alliances have instrumental value for participating courts in the discharge of their mandate. On the other hand, the AACC can be a useful conduit in nurturing an Asian perspective to the global judicial discourse on constitutional issues. In that vein, the article identifies the most suitable means to enable the AACC to optimally discharge its role to help advance respect for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in the region.

Burmese colonial history suggests that a legal system cannot operate independently from the felt needs of the people who are supposed to obey the law. Despite a monopoly of force for many decades, the British failed to create a sustainable legal system in Burma. Colonial status shifted Burma’s economic role from subsistence agriculture to the generation of large-scale exports. By undermining the traditional Burmese legal system and substituting Western international standards of property rights, enforceability of contracts, and an independent judiciary—all attributes of what some consider to be the “Rule of Law”—the legal system amplified and channelled destructive economic and social forces rather than containing them. This paper examines traditional Burmese law, the administration of law in British Burma, and the consequences of the new legal system for the country and its own stability. The paper concludes by suggesting lessons for Myanmar today, and for the study of the “Rule of Law.”

In Japan, the Juris Doctor (JD)-style law-school system was introduced in 2004 as part of a judicial system reform. As of late, this system seems to have become dysfunctional. The pass rate of the national bar exam (NBE) is around 20% every year, and the NBE puts students are under considerable pressure. “Re”-renovation of legal education is, thereby, a huge and pressing issue. Reducing the number of JD students could be a quick solution to the current problems. However, this is not enough, nor is it good for fostering legal professionals “rich both in quality and quantity” (the second aim of the judicial reform). Legal education should go beyond the NBE. The Japanese government and law schools have just begun to re-renovate legal education, giving priority to three challenges: (1) offering continuous legal-education programmes for practitioners; (2) enhancing community service and supporting career development of graduates in the new legal service area; and (3) internationalization. How can the Japanese legal-education system go beyond the NBE? Re-renovation deserves continued attention.

This article introduces the designs and the potential problems of the new lay judge system in Taiwan. This article first describes the background of the development of lay participation in Taiwan, and the 2012 Observer Jury System and the 2018 Lay Judge System drafted by the judiciary. The core of this paper is a qualitative study of four mock trials conducted by four district courts in Taiwan. Through observations and interviews with mock trial lay judges, this article addresses three main problems of the new system, including professional judges’ domination in deliberations, the comprehensibility of law, and lack of evidence rules. It also provides a discussion of the possible solutions to the problems observed. This article urges that training sessions should be provided to both lay judges and legal professionals, adjust the discovery rule, provide guidance on sentencing, and create evidentiary rules.