Global laws are an important inspiration for commercial law reforms around the world. Much analysis of this phenomenon emphasizes the capacity of regulatory élites, such as lawmakers, courts and lawyers, to adapt global laws to local conditions. What is often absent from this top-down analysis is a wide-ranging consideration of what the regulated think about global laws. This article aims to redress this shortcoming in the comparative literature by drawing fresh perspectives from bottom-up responses to global laws. It takes from socio-legal scholarship a framework for analysing the interface between thought formation and social action and explores the question—how do the regulated conceptualize and localize global laws? If compliance is socially constructed from below, as this literature suggests, then attempts to understand legal globalization by focusing exclusively on regulatory élites misses much of the localization story.

As States that use the death penalty liberally in a world that increasingly favours abolition, the Muslim-majority jurisdictions that are strict exponents of Islamic law and the People's Republic of China share a crucial commonality: their frequent use of victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements to remove convicted murderers from the threat of execution. In both cases, rather than a prisoner's last chance at escaping execution being recourse to executive clemency, victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements fulfil largely the same purpose, together with providing means of compensating victims for economic loss, and enabling the State concerned to reduce execution numbers without formally limiting the death penalty's scope in law. Utilizing the functionalist approach of comparative law methodology, this article compares the 13 death penalty retentionist nations that have incorporated Islamic law principles into their positive criminal law with the People's Republic of China, as to the functions underpinning victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements in death penalty cases.

Readers of last October's I.C.L.Q. will recall that this case started life in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea when Australia and New Zealand were granted provisional measures against Japanese high seas tuna fishing in the Pacific.1 That Tribunal had held that the provisions of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (“1982 UNCLOS”) invoked by Australia and New Zealand appeared to afford a basis on which the jurisdiction of an arbitral tribunal might be founded; that the fact that the 1993 Convention on Conservation of Southern Bluefin Tuna applied between the parties did not preclude recourse to the compulsory dispute settlement procedures in Part XV of the 1982 UNCLOS; and that an arbitral tribunal would prima facie have jurisdiction over the merits of the dispute.2 Notwithstanding this necessarily provisional view, when the parties then proceeded to arbitration, Japan maintained its initial preliminary objections, and the award handed down in August 2000 thus deals only with the jurisdiction of the arbitrators.3 The facts and background to the case are set out in the earlier case-note and need not be repeated here.