Existing scholarship of China’s legal institutions has primarily focused on individual institutions, such as the court, the police, or the legal profession. This article proposes a relational approach to the study of political-legal institutions in China. To understand the order and exercise of power by various political-legal institutions, the relational approach emphasizes the spatial positions of actors or institutions (the police, courts, lawyers, etc.) within the broader political-legal system and their mutual interactions. We suggest that the changing ideas of the Chinese leadership about the role of law as an instrument of governance have shaped the relations between various legal and political institutions. The interactions of these political-legal institutions (e.g. the “iron triangle” of the police, the court and the procuracy) further reveal the dynamics of power relations at work.

This article provides an analytical account of how politics and law in China are organically integrated in the institutional architecture of courts as designed by the Chinese Communist Party (“the Party”). This design allows the Party to retain its supreme authority in the interpretation, application, and enforcement of the law through its institutional control over courts. At the same time, the Party can, under this design, also afford to grant an autonomous sphere where courts can perform their adjudicative functions with minimal interference from the Party, as long as the Party is assured of full authority to determine the scope of the “autonomous-zone,” to impose rules on it, and to revoke it when necessary. Consequently, courts assume a double character: a pliant political agent on the one hand and a legal institution of its own agency on the other.

In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has declared that its governance must dominate over all aspects of law-making and enforcement, declaring that its leadership must be implemented across the entire process of governing the country in accordance with the law. Contemporaneous to this new way of thinking about the law-Party nexus is a propaganda push to integrate moral values into the law. This paper is about moralizing governance in the Xi Jinping era. It explores the ideology behind the promotion of this morals–law integration, focusing on the Socialist Core Values in the legal realm under the current Xi Jinping administration. We do so from two interrelated perspectives. The first examines the relationship between law and morality. Here, we argue that the Party’s calls for a law–morality amalgam can be understood as a form of “pan-moralism.” The second looks at the supremacy of Party rule, extending the theory of the “Leviathan” proposed by Thomas Hobbes to take into account the Party’s morality push. This two-pronged argument enables us to assert that the Xi Jinping administration is creating a “virtuous Leviathan.”

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.

The adoption of weak remedies, such as declarations or recommendations by the Bangladesh Supreme Court in litigations on state-induced forced slum evictions, significantly contributes to the tardy implementation of court orders. In this context, there is a growing global consensus on the structural injunction—a remedy that enables judges to monitor and bring about governmental compliance with judicial orders of social rights litigation. The Bangladesh Supreme Court faces several real and compelling challenges relating to its constitutional authority and institutional capacity that hinder remedial innovation. Through examining relevant constitutional provisions, judicial approach, and comparative examples, this article argues that the court has the capacity to overcome these constraints. Thus, it advocates judicial reform in Bangladesh to offset the state’s often arbitrary interference with the basic necessity of housing of the slum dwellers.

In order to portray the true extent of judicial independence in China’s judicial practices, this article first clarifies the contested meanings of “judicial independence” within Chinese judicial circles and provides a detailed literature review of the main school of thoughts on the extent of judicial independence in China. In contrast to the existing literature—most of which sees judicial independence in China as stagnant—this thesis suggests employing the strategic interaction approach to study the development of impartial adjudication in China and argues that the extent of adjudicative independence is evolving with the amount of judicial discretion afforded by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to judges.

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 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.