Artificial intelligence (AI) and law is an AI research area that has a history spanning more than 50 years. In the early stages, several legal-expert systems were developed. Legal-expert systems are tools designed to realize fair judgments in court. In addition to this research, as information and communication technologies and AI technologies have progressed, AI and law has broadened its view from legal-expert systems to legal analytics and, recently, a lot of machine-learning and text-processing techniques have been employed to analyze legal information. The research trends are the same in Japan as well and not only people involved with legal-expert systems, but also those involved with natural language processing as well as lawyers have become interested in AI and law. This report introduces the history of and the research activities on applying AI to the legal domain in Japan.

The general, but false, perception of migrant smuggling through Indonesia, a large, archipelagic country, is that smugglers operate entirely on their own. In fact, the more complex smuggling operations rely on broad networks of foreign organizers as well as local intermediaries and ground staff. In 2011, the Indonesian legislature introduced a severe minimum sentence for any involvement in migrant smuggling with the expectation that the judiciary would apply the sentence in all future cases. However, some judges proceeded to hand down sentences below the statutory minimum, arguing that the punishment is not commensurate to the relatively minor roles played by locals. This article examines how judges at all levels of the judiciary did so in ten related cases. In conclusion, it argues that statutory sentences are not mandatory in Indonesia and that, by applying below-minimum sentences, judges not only maintain judicial independence; they also effectively exercise a judicial review function.

This article provides critical and analytical views on legal regulation to achieve a balance between FinTech innovation, risk prevention, and financial stability, by focusing on the trend of FinTech firms entering the financial-services industry and the associated regulatory and legal challenges that are already arising in China. It adopts a balanced approach as a theoretical-analysis perspective, weighing various considerations, and proposes the policy option of FinTech regulation under the principle of interest balance. The analysis aims to contribute new insights to an ongoing debate in China on the relationship between legal and regulatory reform, FinTech innovation, and risk prevention. This article argues that legal challenges, rather than technical problems, remain the key obstacles to effective FinTech regulation. Our proposed hypothesis seeks to explain how a legal regulation achieves balancing the competing interests between FinTech innovation, risk prevention, and financial stability in the booming of China’s FinTech. Finally, this article proposes the implementation of goal-oriented responsive regulation by improving the legal framework of FinTech regulatory regimes through policy option.

Due to the pressures of urbanization, the urban poor often find themselves trapped in illegal settlements and informal employment. As housing is not affordable and formal employment is inaccessible to them because of their lack of education and skills, they live a precarious existence with insecure land tenure and employment. Discriminated against by the state on the grounds of their illegal status, the urban poor are unable to establish their identity and personhood rights as urban citizens, and so cannot access basic rights such as health care and social security. This article is based on fieldwork in Surakarta in Indonesia which studied the impact of a land-titling programme in an area previously characterized by informal tenure. It finds that the legitimation provided by land titles had a significant impact upon the lives of the residents, enabling them to access other personhood rights.

It is widely accepted that law is essential for economic growth. Prominent economists in China have repeatedly called for strengthening the legal system so that the economy can continue to grow. Nevertheless, the fact that China has been able to achieve rapid economic growth while the law is weak seems to cast doubt on the significance of law. It is even suggested that China is a counter-example to the importance of law and, more provocatively, it is argued that China’s economy grew rapidly not “in spite of,” but “because of,” weak law. To gain a richer and deeper understanding of law in China’s economic growth, this paper conducts a case-study of China’s stock market by examining its growth history and legal development. It is found that China has built from scratch a complex legal and regulatory system governing the stock market, which actually played a critical role in supporting the growth of the market. However, the trajectory of development was law following market growth, which was in turn caused by ideological and political liberalization. On the other hand, the market did not grow to its full potential and currently it faces serious challenges to fulfil the task of supporting the development of the economy, and the fundamental reason is political and ideological restrictions; likewise, the improvement of law for investor protection has not been sustained, for which similarly politics and ideologies offer an explanation. The experience of the stock market suggests that, while law is indispensable for sustaining China’s economic growth, political and ideological liberalization is fundamental in that it is not only necessary to free up the economy so that it can continue to grow in the first place, but also crucial to further strengthening the whole legal system.

This article explores one aspect of India’s attempts to address its access to justice dilemma through the establishment of district-level consumer fora. Data points are extracted from 1,400 cases nationwide to piece together a portrait of the input and output of these institutions. The data collected include: win/loss rates; time from filing to decision; presence of attorneys (and their effects on win/loss rates and time from filing to decision); amounts of damages and costs awarded; and types of cases filed. In the end, this sampling of cases, combined with observations and interviews, led to several broad conclusions—that access to justice is increased but not for the marginalized or poor; that the consumer fora are severely underused; and that they are highly localized institutions leaving significant discretion in the hands of forum Presidents to drive the process which greatly varies the effects on access to justice among districts.

Since its inception in 1957, Malaysia’s Federal Court (FC) has often been embroiled in high-profile decisions that have dramatically shaped the rule of law and constitutional practice in Malaysia. Recent political change has renewed hope that the FC can reassert its early role as an independent and impartial arbiter of political conflict. This paper investigates determinants of the FC’s behaviour since 1960. It draws on a unique data set of 102 major political cases and socio-biographic profiles of the 73 judges who voted in these cases. After describing patterns of court decisions across time and judges, we test specifically for the impact on their decisions of the 1988 judicial crisis, length of time on the bench, the terms of successive prime ministers, and judges’ personal attributes, such as religion and ethnicity. Ethnicity, appointment after 1988, and the appointing prime minister proved to be closely associated with the direction of voting. We then position the results in the context of Malaysia’s evolving constitutional democracy and discuss their implications for students of comparative judicial politics.

This article analyses the “local turn” in refugee governance in Indonesia through a comparative case-study of two cities: Makassar and Jakarta. It compares how these two cities have responded to the obligations to provide alternative accommodation to detention, imposed upon them by the Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR). While the shift to non-custodial community shelters has been widely praised, we discuss issues that arose when the national government shifted the responsibility for providing accommodation for refugees to local governments, without the allocation of the required funds. The outcome has been a general lack of engagement by local governments. By locating this case-study in the wider global trend of “local turns” in the management of refugee issues, we argue that, in Indonesia, the “local turn” in responsibility for refugees is not fostering a protection approach, but has worsened the conditions for refugees.

Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles, as is often assumed. According to Buddhist (monastic) principles of judging, legal procedures—similar to those used in state legal settings—are equally essential. These procedures govern everything from making legal complaints, to the structuring of trials, to determining jurisdiction, and many other topics. By examining Buddhist judicial systems, this article not only casts new light on the pluri-legal landscape of Asia; it also offers new reflections on the intersection of religion-based and state-based systems of law in the contemporary world.

Notwithstanding its defining feature of normative pluralism, the socialist state of Vietnam basically adopts a legal centralist approach to regulation. The judiciary is arguably the most illustrative of this approach, since it is the main forum where legal centralism encounters normative pluralism. Our research examines the choice of norms in judicial adjudication in Vietnam to check the effectiveness of its legal centralist approach. It finds that, despite lacking institutional support, judges managed to apply customary norms at their discretion against the state’s emphasis on top-down legal rules. A legitimacy-based analysis explains this phenomenon. It points out that judges conceptualized their legitimacy under the influence of both legal and extra-legal rules, thus making it apart from the legality. Judges attempt to bridge the gap between legitimacy and legality enabled de factor normative pluralism. In looking at the influence of customary norms over judicial adjudication, the article aims to make both theoretical and practical contributions. Theoretically, it enriches the scholarship of normative pluralism by showing how legitimacy-building keeps normative pluralism effective, irrespective of the dominating legal centralism. Practically, it proffers insightful implications for the ongoing court reforms in Vietnam based upon the findings.

This paper suggests that Afghanistan’s fractured plural legal system is beginning to show some signs of cohesion and coherence. I briefly describe the aspiration set out in the Constitution of Afghanistan and its mandate to legislators and jurists to harmonize Islamic jurisprudence, the principles of justice, customary norms, and international treaty obligations. I then discuss some of the setbacks, obstacles, and more recent progress that have shaped the journey towards that aspiration. The paper specifically addresses the role of lawyers as they learn to navigate the more coherent landscape and the development and impact of a nascent adversarial system. Finally, the paper addresses the role of customary dispute resolution and the bifurcated legal-education system, and their impact on the development of a more unified legal system.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are transforming the credit market around the world. Algorithmic credit scoring (ACS) is increasingly used to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness, using technology to glean non-traditional data from smartphones and analyze them through machine-learning algorithms. These processes promise efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness compared with traditional credit scoring. However, this technology raises public concerns about opacity, unfair discrimination, and threats to individual privacy and autonomy. Many countries in Southeast Asia are introducing ACS in consumer finance markets, although—even with the significant concerns raised—there is an ongoing and concerning lag in oversight and regulation of the process. Regulation is vital to delivering big data and AI promises in the financial services market, while ensuring fairness and public interest. This article utilizes Vietnam, where the lending industry deploys ACS but in a situation of legal limbo, as a case-study to analyze the consequences of this technology. Vietnam is one of the foremost Southeast Asian countries in which ACS usage is spreading rapidly, and this provides an excellent opportunity to review the regulation, or lack thereof, and determine the implications that this may have for other countries that are currently introducing ACS in consumer finance markets. The article concludes with a proposal to regulate ACS in Vietnam based on international regulation and guidelines on ACS, data privacy, and AI to enable a transparent, accessible, and fair process.

Many studies agree that a weak intellectual property right (IPR) legal system likely reduces innovation or creation; they also predict that increasing intellectual properties (IPs) in developing countries will automatically lead to local needs for stronger formal protection. However, the situation is found to be more complex in China. With a focus on the use of IPs and relevant protection mechanisms in China, this study points out that many companies acquire IPs for purposes that do not depend on their enforcement; many companies have informal ways of protecting their IPs without resorting to court enforcement. Both the alternative functions and the alternative enforcement mechanisms are shaped by industrial characteristics, especially in four aspects: technological features, administrative regulation, market characteristics, and network structure. Based on studies of different industrial sectors in China, this article develops a general framework for analyzing the role of IPRs in industrial practice.

This article examines the government-funded legal aid system of Bangladesh. It indicates that the Bangladeshi legal aid system is lacking in terms of both legal provisions and the actual performance of the Legal Aid Services Act. The inadequacies in the implementation of the Act even raise the concern of whether the government has any intention to use the legal system to improve the condition of the poor or whether it intends to establish a legal aid system that is directed to providing mere lip service to the poor. The Bangladeshi legal aid system is therefore in a paradox; the state has established an institution that exposes its drawbacks and is not able to meet the needs of the beneficiaries. The article finally makes recommendations in order to redress the deficiencies of the system and thus to ensure effective access to justice for those who are in need of the service.

The purpose of this study is to show how the Japanese government has created laws with harsher punishment since the 1990s. While a tendency toward harsher punishment is common in advanced Western countries, a similar tendency in Japan has prompted scholarly discussion on whether it can be understood through the “penal-populism” framework. However, it lacks in systematic evidence. This study presents three findings that differ from previous studies through a quantitative analysis of legislation with harsher punishment. First, while previous literature argues that the legislation increased in the latter half of the 1990s, this study shows that it peaked in the middle of the 2000s. Second, while previous literature argues that the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Justice promote the legislation, this study shows that it is caused by every ministry’s drafting Bills. Third, this study shows that it does not quantitatively avoid partisan conflicts, contrary to the prediction of the “penal-populism” theory.

In the interstices of international law, quite a number of states have developed strategies to reach out to and engage with their diasporic populations or ethnonational kin outside of their borders who are not their citizens but citizens of the state in which they habitually reside. Some states even provide for that kind of policy in their Constitutions. Some states grant preferential treatment and special rights to “kin-foreigners,” thereby creating “ethnizens.” This article canvasses provisions in national Constitutions in Europe and Asia that provide grounds for engaging with the members of the nation outside of the state, analyzes the modes of engagement—mainly ethnizenship practices and various ways to strengthen links with diasporas—and examines the rules of engagement. It shows that the international norm has not provided effective guidelines regarding the strategies of transnational nation-building beyond the personal boundaries of the state and concludes that the decoupling the nation from the state registered by the transnational nationhood strategies falls short of constituting a departure from the logic of the Westphalian nation-state.

A prevalent assumption is that digital legal databases generate an exhaustive and inclusive archive for academics and legal professionals to use for gathering information. Bridging theories and methods from digital media studies and legal anthropology, I challenge this assumption and demonstrate how digitizing law is a politicized process that is tied to legacies of colonialism and modern epistemic frameworks of law and justice. Employing the concept of legal pluralism, I conduct a comparative study of urban secular state courts and rural Islamic/customary non-state courts (shalish) in Bangladesh to show how the construction of digital legal databases distorts and erases alternate frameworks of law and women’s socio-legal experiences. I discuss two significant use of digital legal databases to highlight why it is important to study the gaps and prejudices: (1) they are central to generating new forms of archives—digital archives; (2) they provide the data sets to help train artificial intelligence and influence automated outputs. I develop the term “neocolonial digitality” to explain how power related to legacies of colonialism and other forms of discrimination are embedded in the digitizing process. This concept also holds space for the newer forms of hierarchies, exclusions, and power structures that digitality permits, focusing on the particular harms marginalized communities encounter in the Global South.

The legal- and law-related-services market is undergoing significant transformation: it is being expanded and becoming highly competitive, affected by the cultural and economic diversification of the current world society. In Japan, another aspect must be considered in order to clearly understand this transformation. In addition to fully qualified legal professionals, or bengoshi, there are many different certified law-related practitioners such as shihō shoshi (judicial scriveners), gyōsei shoshi (administrative scriveners), zeirishi (certified public tax attorneys), benrishi (patent attorneys), sharōshi (labour and social-security attorneys), and others who are also important actors in the legal- and law-related-services market. These certified law-related practitioners take on important roles not only in services related to civil and administrative law, but also in corporate legal matters in the specialized fields of the business activities of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Japan. Traditionally, bengoshi and other certified law-related practitioners have shared the legal-services market symbiotically, without competition. However, the situation has gradually changed since around the 1990s. In this paper, the factors of the transformation of the Japanese legal- and law-related-services market are discussed based on empirical data, and the direction of the transformation in this market is indicated.

Since the 1990s, the Japanese social structure has been changing mainly due to economic globalization. The gap between rich and poor has been widened. The economic policy of the government that tries to introduce the market-competition principle into all sectors in order to revive economic growth is promoting such social change. It seems illusionary that either activating market competition or the reconstruction of the welfare state could revive economic growth. Instead, we should consider a transformation from an industrial to a sustainable society as an inevitable course of social development in the twenty-first century. In 2015, the Japanese Association of the Sociology of Law (JASL) held a symposium entitled “Law and Legal Science in the Transformation to Sustainable Society” during its annual meeting. The main issue was which role legal studies can/must play in such a transformation. I think there are two different approaches. One is to establish the “sustainable principle” as a legal principle like the “precautionary principle” in environmental law. The other approach is to reconsider and reconstruct fundamental legal categories of modern law, which have supported industrial society as its legal infrastructure. This approach will be the subject of the paper. I will deal with the case of property rights to agricultural land.