While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Charter has been read by commentators as a constitutional document, its use of the peoples of Southeast Asia as fictional authors of the text has not been fully explored. A people’s reading of the ASEAN Charter provides a critical perspective that uncovers the elitist and statist nature of this document. A close textual analysis of the preamble reveals that these purported authors are displaced by the Heads of State as the speaking subject and creators of the new legal entity. This textual displacement transforms the constituent treaty into a state monologue as it imposes a utopian vision of capitalism on the geopolitical body of the region. Contrary to its democratic claims, the Charter has only constitutionalised reification, class structures, and the exclusion of the peoples from power. The ASEAN constitution silences its own authors.

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.

Over the past few years, Japan has been witnessing the emergence, regeneration, and spread of micro-relational forms of cohesion, solidarity, and responsibility in response to the ryūdō-ka shakai and hikikomori phenomena. These terms refer to the crisis of social relations and co-operation, which commenced after the collapse of the Japanese economy in the early 1990s. While scholars, particularly sociologists and anthropologists, have consistently inquired into these micro-sites of civic friendship and responsibility, their juridical status is yet to be ascertained. This article argues that the paradigm of societal constitutionalism developed by Gunther Teubner can be of precious assistance in conducting such an assessment. In particular, it offers a contextualization of Teubner’s reflections on constitutional pluralism and fragmentation of social functions from the perspective of Kiyoshi Hasegawa’s state-centric scholarship on the regulatory dynamics of neighbourhood associations as micro-relational communities in suburban areas. A particular is given, and only given, within relations.1

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 Japan, an increasing number of elderly people are facing legal issues. However, whether they have enough access to legal services remains unclear. Therefore, this study used a mixed-methods approach—web and interview surveys—to identify elderly people’s experience with legal problems, factors that affect their decisions to consult lawyers about their problems, and factors that relate to their knowledge about the availability of legal consultation. Results showed that legal problems were related to issues with family or relatives. Second, elderly people did not consult lawyers if they could solve problems on their own, felt helpless, or lacked a connection with legal professionals. Third, respondents who had knowledge about the availability of legal consultation were male or working elderly. The overall results suggest that elderly people are not homogeneous, and more support is needed for those who feel helpless or lack knowledge about legal consultation.

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.

Hong Kong’s history of compulsory schooling (as opposed to education) commenced under colonial rule and has been maintained by the local government following the 1997 Handover. Beyond the exception of “reasonable cause,” homeschooling, or elective home education, is in principle prohibited under the laws of Hong Kong. However, there is evidence of a growing homeschooling community in Hong Kong that relies on loopholes in the law and an apparent de facto government policy to operate. This article sets out the background, legal framework, and homeschooling practice in Hong Kong. It criticizes the current situation from the perspectives of legal certainty and children’s rights. The author suggests that the government should take action to devise clear laws and public policy in relation to elective home education.

Where does the legal profession’s identity originate from? How do we explain the intra-professional variations, as multiple legal professions diverge in their political orientations? This paper argues that the legal profession critically develops their core identity resisting incumbent rule when the state undergoes fundamental power reconfiguration. It is their political position as opposed to power in a critical juncture of state transformation that determines the legal profession’s collective ideal of who they are and what actions they take. Drawing on 133 interviews with Taiwanese judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, extensive fieldwork, and archival data up to the 1990s, this paper demonstrates how democratization shapes professional identity. As respective professions experienced different levels and models of authoritarian containment, they took separate trajectories to challenge the Kuomintang’s party-state and pledge to different normative commitments. Taiwanese judges categorically defend judicial independence, lawyers advocate for people’s rights, and prosecutors marshal under justice to check abuse of 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.

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.

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 research examines the impact of Chinese cultural values on the application of law on contractual damages. Following an experimental design, 43 in-depth interviews were conducted with Chinese judges in 13 cities and provinces across China. The data reveal two patterns. First, the judges took the cultural values into account when determining the amount of damages. Second, the consideration of cultural value factors reduced the judges’ consideration of legal factors. The local cultural values did not change the Chinese judges’ understanding of law. Instead, the judges compromised the legal requirements and cultural desires by using the discretion offered to them or by recommending mediation. The consideration of cultural values is not only the result of judges’ personal preferences, but also of judges seeking social approval. The motivation of Chinese judges to obtain social approval may be enhanced by the assessment criteria and the institutional constraints of Chinese courts.

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.

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.