The scale and urgency of the consequences of the Anthropocene for human civilization call for comprehensive responses from human societies. As leaders in law, law schools have a role in helping their respective societies respond to the impacts of the Anthropocene. The present analysis discusses potential approaches to help law schools in Asia integrate the Anthropocene into their legal education curricula. Drawing upon existing legal education literature regarding issues of content, teaching tools, curriculum placement, and subject status as a law topic, the analysis explores the potential issues facing law schools in the adoption of the Anthropocene as a component of learning. The analysis then addresses the particular contextual sociocultural, economic, and political circumstances likely to challenge the integration of the Anthropocene into Asian law schools. The conclusion finishes with directions for future research.

In May 2018, Artidjo Alkostar retired from the Supreme Court of Indonesia after a judicial career spanning almost two decades. Over this period, he presided over many of Indonesia’s most prominent and controversial criminal cases and became renowned for routinely rejecting corruption appeals and increasing prison sentences. In the celebratory publications that marked his retirement, Alkostar was held up as a model judge, with senior legal figures, including Supreme Court judges, singling out his strong work ethic, integrity, simplicity of character, and firmness. Curiously absent from the list of praiseworthy attributes were pre-requisites for effective judging, including adequate legal knowledge, transparent legal reasoning and decision-making, objectivity and avoiding the perception of bias. An analysis of Alkostar’s most notorious decisions suggests that he, and the judges who served with him, did not always clearly display these pre-requisites. This article considers what this says about judging in Indonesia and what might, in practice, be the defining characteristics of a good judge there.

The Principles of Asian Contract Law (PACL) are the most recent addition to the series of uniform laws regarding transnational commercial contracts. This time, the harmonization initiative must address the problem of a great variety of legal traditions, all of which are quite difficult to reconcile. The author focuses on the object and objectives of the PACL by reconsidering the notion of “Asian law” and the alleged cultural neutrality of contract law as a legal discipline. The paper argues that the PACL project lacks clarity. Its ambitious objectives, while apparently intelligible, fail to produce the desired results in their entirety: the Asian regional harmonization of contract law turns out to resemble its occidental forerunners. The study goes beyond the traditional comparative law. It explores the model law (in the making) in a broader context of legal policy, parallel regional private-law-making efforts in the field of contract law as well as in the context of legal globalization.

How do dignity discourses shift the framing of struggles for basic legal freedoms? Based on our decade-long empirical research on lawyers and politics in China, we provide a theoretical intervention in a burgeoning socio-legal scholarship on dignity in this article. Drawing inductively from in-depth interviews, we find that a powerful current of dignity consciousness and sentiment, joined by an acute awareness of dignity harms, flows through the community of Chinese activist lawyers. Their dignity discourses can be witnessed and explained in four streams of awareness: (1) dignity experienced as an ideal in juridical, philosophical, and theological idioms; (2) dignity takings experienced indirectly and directly in the property takings of clients’ homes, farms, and livelihood; (3) assaults on dignity through property takings of spaces of religious worship; and (4) the takings of professional dignity from the lawyers charged with defending the dignity of others. This article points to the value of dignity framings in the general theory of collective action for basic legal freedoms.

It has long been argued that the legal system does not have a strong role in explaining China’s economic miracle; therefore, China is often presented as an anomaly for the “law matters” hypothesis. This study contributes to the debate from a unique perspective by examining the connection between law and the operation of factor markets. In China, laws and regulations governing factor markets have been systematically distorted by the government, intentionally or unintentionally, to facilitate the nation’s enormous economic growth in the short run at the cost of environmental quality, ordinary citizens’ welfare, and long-term economic health. Thus, China has become a fast-growing but unsustainable economy.

This paper asks how globalization relates to legal culture. It argues that there exists, at least in the developed world, a general global culture; it follows, then, that there must be a global legal culture as well. Not everyone in modern societies is completely drawn into the global legal culture, however, as the research of the David and Jaruwan Engel in Thailand suggests. In general, however, the legal cultures of modern, developed societies are strongly convergent. In particular, there is emerging a global and convergent culture of human rights. Some Asian scholars and political figures have argued that conceptions of fundamental human rights are culturally Western, and may not suit the cultures of the East. The paper argues, however, that the human rights culture is not “Western” so much as modern; it arose in the West, but it is no more unsuitable to Asian societies than the automobile and the computer, which also arose first in the West.

Since the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and some states of Southeast Asia, the international financial institutions and individual donor states have initiated wide-scale legal-aid programmes to assist these states in their transition from socialism to a market economy. Whereas the aid from financial institutions vis-à-vis recipient states is often agreed upon specific conditionalities, the donor states design their foreign legal aid according to individual preferences, although sometimes with references to universal goals. Currently, various donor states provide legal aid to Uzbekistan. Given the fact that Uzbekistan is the former Soviet Republic that still bears multiple traces of a socialist legal system and additionally integrates indigenous informal law, this research provides an analysis of how different donor states base their legal-aid activities on entirely different philosophies and levels of gravity, and how receptive the hybrid structure of Uzbekistan’s law is towards such aid.

The newly established judicial-transparency platforms, like China Judgements Online, have provided access to a new resource—judicial big data—making it possible to conduct empirical, big-data-based legal research. However, as is often the case with new products, these platforms—China Judgements Online, in particular—pose a few problems for big-data-based legal research: insufficient academic depth; immature technical methods; and lack of innovation due to flawed data, strict technical thresholds, and lack of theoretical ambition and ability. In the future, big-data-based legal research should make use of current data resources, continue to promote statistical science and computer science in research, and apply small-data research methods, and in the meanwhile pay attention to the combination of data and theory.

This article presents a theory of the order of power to explain the dynamics and interaction between the political and legal orders in China’s courts. This theory posits that the political order is embodied in the extensive administrative ranking system (ARS) of the People’s Republic of China and has a systematic impact on the legal order regardless of the subject matter. The ARS is a system that regulates power relations between various institutional and personal actors in all key power fields, including courts. According to this theory, power, as stratified by the ARS, relativizes law during the processes of legal implementation, application, and enforcement. This theory provides a coherent explanation of judicial behavioural patterns in different subject matters, such as the centralization of criminal investigations in some crimes but not others, the distribution of corruption in China’s courts, and the outcome patterns of administrative litigation. Whilst the conventional wisdom sees that the political and the legal orders in China’s courts are partitioned based on the subject matter, this theory asserts the opposite: the impact of the political order is systemic, comprehensive, and applicable to the entire legal field. This article fills a knowledge gap in Chinese law and politics, where the ARS has received little attention except for recent studies on administrative litigation. The article also identifies two overlooked but distinctive features of the ARS—its multidimensionality and interconnectivity—our understanding of which is disproportionately poor in relation to their significance.

The Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR) was a promising step to a better humanitarian response for refugees and asylum seekers arriving in Indonesia. It also provided a much-needed legal framework to validate refugees’ presence and to ground civil -society organizations’ advocacy on their behalf. However, a closer look at the PR and earlier drafts of the document shows serious compromises that: (1) reproduce the notion that refugees are only transiting in Indonesia; (2) frame refugees as passive objects, failing to recognize them as subjects with rights; and (3) prioritize security concerns that position refugees at odds with Indonesian society (masyarakat). Using the “What’s the Problem Represented to be” approach, this article highlights what is included and excluded from the PR and how it falls short of guaranteeing meaningful protection for refugees while living in Indonesia.

This paper focuses on the conflict of norms in the interface between the “transplanted” formal law and the local social norms in the land-law reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar, each representing different legal families, while sharing commonness in that both have attempted law-making in the post-colonial independence period in order to restore the basis of the livelihoods of the local population. Both of the legal concepts of “land-use right” (quyen su dung dat) in Vietnam and “land-use right for cultivation” (loat paing kwint) in Myanmar have been the product of law-makers’ restorative attempts at farmland security, while intentionally avoiding usage of the term “ownership” that would result in the capitalist transaction of land as a commodity. However, the contemporary land-law reforms led by donor-oriented “legal transplant” in these countries have resulted in the plunder of such policy, by reintroducing the same mechanisms of land exploitation as existed in the colonial days. Roaring protests of the local agricultural population seem to be a rising-up of the social norm descended from the immemorial past as an unwritten Constitution to bring an end to the centuries-long movement of “legal transplant” of the modern capitalist law.

Chinese fintech, initially taking the form as “Internet finance,” is growing rapidly and poses great challenges to its financial regulatory authorities. Acclaimed as a new financial innovation, Internet finance was once accepted and even welcomed by the normally conservative Chinese financial regulators, who simultaneously adopted a wait-and-see strategy, to encourage such innovation and avoid overwhelming regulation. The benevolent regulation stance, however, bred rampant Ponzi schemes or fake financial innovation, resulting in tremendous monetary losses among lots of investors. To show a quick and active response, the central government popped into a whack-a-mole game, starting a four-year campaign of strict Internet finance regulation that has even cracked down on all the P2P lending platforms. This article analyzes the regulatory policy updates of Chinese Internet finance that is transforming to certain kinds of lawful fintech with difficulties, and that adaptive regulatory-organization restructure, regulatory-system optimization, and regulatory-model innovation would be more effective and constructive regulatory options.

The Indian Supreme Court has long enjoyed an almost mythic reputation for progressive and creative jurisprudence, but a series of recent scandals is beginning to erode this well-settled authority. One of the most troubling of these incidents has been an allegation of sexual harassment and intimidation by a Court staffer against then sitting Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi. This article draws on media analysis and ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of the “CJI Scandal” to explore what it means for judges and judging in contemporary India. I argue that the justices’ response to the allegations are part of a broader shift in Indian judging. Far from being the product of an institution imbued with mythic qualities, judging in India is increasingly coming to represent an example of mythos, or “an assertive discourse of power and authority … something to be believed and obeyed.”

Court mediation is now playing a crucial role in the Chinese legal system. Based on two case studies in Yunnan Province, this paper examines how court mediation works in Southwest China. It finds that court mediation can expand the capacity of the court concerning case acceptance, and is capable of fixing multicentre disputes and complicated social problems. However, the paper also points out that when encountering some ill-suited cases, justice may be undermined and the judge’s role may be confused. Therefore, it is necessary to pass some law to exclude the ill-suited cases from the mediation track when promoting court mediation in Southwest China.

Along with China’s economic downturn, there has been an increase in the size of China’s underground lending market. The mounting risk in connection with this underground lending market triggers tremendous interest and debates over appropriate and effective regulatory responses. Because of its private and non-transparent character, the underground lending market is likely to confound those seeking to find “black letter” law governing its regulatory framework. Instead of relying on its conventional tighten-up strategy—using the muscle of the Criminal Law—China has orchestrated an experiment by allowing local legislation to formalize part of the underground lending market, as well as a judicial approach by recognizing a higher interest rate charged by underground lenders to borrowers. This article tries to understand the underlying rationale of regulatory and judicial movements through both law and society, and law and finance lens.

Since the first Asian Law and Society Conference (ALSA) was held at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2016, a number of special sessions have been organized to focus on the deconstruction of the Westphalian transnational order based on the concept of the “nation-state.”1 This dominant hegemony was predicated on the congruence of the geo-territorial boundaries of both the state and the nation, as well as the “assumed integration” of state-defined “citizenship” and another distinctly layered “membership” based on culture, ethnic, religious, and indigenous affiliations. The “nation-state” ideology has thus masked a history of tensions and conflicts, often manifested in the form of oppression, persecution, and genocide directed at the nation and its peoples by the state and its predatory institutions. Our studies have shown that such conflicts between the nation and the state have been observed in multiple regions in Asia, including Kashmir in India; Moro and Islamic communities of Mindanao in the Philippines; Karen, Kachin, and other autonomous nations in Myanmar; West Papua, Aceh, Kalimantan, South Moluccas, Minahasa, and Riau in Indonesia; Kurds in multiple state systems of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran; and Palestine in Israel, among many other culturally autonomous nucleated communities in Asia and across the world.2 The phrase “the nation and the state” was specifically chosen to distinguish and highlight the unique conflictual histories of two geo-political entities and to provide a fundamentally differing interpretation of history, geography, the role of law, and global affairs from the perspectives of nation peoples, rather than from that of the state or international organizations, as traditional analyses do. The Westphalian “nation-state” hegemony led to the inviolability of the state’s sovereign control over the nation and peoples within a state-delimited territory. The state then began to engage in another predatory project: to strengthen and extend its international influence over other states and, thus, the nations within these states, by adopting new constitutional provisions to offer cross-border “citizenship” to diasporic “ethnic-nationals” and descendants of “ex-migrants” who now inhabit foreign states. The nations have similarly capitalized on constitutional activism by erecting their own Constitutions to explore collaboration with other nations, as well as diasporic populations of their own, in order to carve out a path toward the nations’ independence within, and even beyond, the respective state systems. The “constitutional” activism sought by the state and the nation has become an important political vehicle with which to engage in possible collaboration with diasporic “ethno-nationals” and ex-migrant communities, in order to further assert political influence and strengthen trans-border politics of the state and the nation. Three articles included in this issue investigate such constitutional activism of cross-border politics and transnational collaborations in Asia, the Americas, Europe, and other regions across the globe.