This chapter shows how local lawyers and NGOs have sought to challenge the practice of ‘authoritarian constitutionalism’, including in the courtroom. Yet, even when the courts appear to take centre stage here, the audience and message for courtroom performances are unexpected. This chapter explains that lawyers who articulate constitutionally-framed arguments in high-profile court cases often see themselves as speaking first and foremost to journalists and NGO observers in the gallery, and thus to the local public and international stakeholders to whom those observers in turn report. To the extent that courts play a role in constitutional practice, in other words, they do so as a stage on which contestations can be performed for a wider audience. Hence, this chapter develops a concept of an ‘extended legal complex’, which seeks to capitalise on the ruling party’s desire to maintain at least a semblance of fidelity to the legal process to articulate critiques of alternative interpretations of the Constitution before a national and international audience. The chapter then explains how the Cambodian People’s Party has sought to neutralise this threat to their constitutional legitimacy by politicising the Bar Association, thereby hamstringing the work of activist-lawyers and legally complicating their relationships with local NGOs.

Through investigating how exactly bribery take place, this chapter examines why guanxi is a necessary conduit of corruption in China. I argue that guanxi-practice embodies an alternative contracting mechanism of corruption with three functions. First, it allows corruption practitioners to communicate their intent to exchange without explicitly expressing it. Second, it minimizes the otherwise prohibitively high transactional costs and reduces the moral and cognitive barriers of corruption. Third, it contains a self-enforcing mechanism that allows the terms of corruption to be negotiated and enforced. Performed with tactics and etiquettes, guanxi-practice seamlessly grafts a corrupt and immoral agreement upon a social setting, in which venality is neutralized and rationalized. In this redefined social reality of corruption, an instrumental relationship is perceived or at least presentable as a reciprocal relationship based on social commitment. Lastly, I draw attention to the emergence of professional guanxi-brokers that has marketized guanxi and extended the otherwise highly restricted opportunity to engage in parochial corruption to a much-broadened user base.

This chapter focuses on the change in the law known as the equity of redemption, which took form in the late seventeenth century, and made the title to mortgaged land more secure through the provision that rents could be sequestered to pay off a loan after the due date, to avoid the title to the property reverting to the lender. This legal change led to a rapid expansion of mortgaging and associated conveyancing. It also demonstrates how interest-bearing loans, based on the security of property, became a source of both income and, more importantly, stable abstract value that could be used to increase the money supply by underpinning the creation of local notes and bills. Mortgage income could also smooth credit flows by providing capital when outgoings were greater than incomings. In the past this would have triggered the need to litigate to increase income, but now money could be borrowed. This chapter will also examine savings held in the form of bonds.

In 1921 representatives of the United Kingdom and of the revolutionary Sinn Féin administration in Ireland signed a conditional agreement that subsequently became a treaty establishing the Irish Free State. Lawyers played an important role on each side, none more so than F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), the then UK Cabinet Secretary. Thomas Jones observed caustically that ‘it is notorious that a lawyer cannot draft his own will clearly’. As regards the ambit of a Boundary Commission proposed by Article 12 to redraw the border created in Ireland in 1920 by the United Kingdom, Irish leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins ultimately relied on British goodwill. Birkenhead depended on his knowledge of legal precedent and the Privy Council. This chapter considers the professional status of lawyers on each side and suggests that a certain ambiguity in the agreement enabled a settlement more readily than any insistence on absolute clarity would have.

While the field of European law scholarship has long maintained a form of ‘colonial amnesia’, this chapter considers the growing literature that has emerged over the past few years studying the entanglements between European law projects and (post)colonialism. The chapter first suggests a new analytical framework to assess these ‘entanglements’ and ‘continuities’ by looking at three ‘carriers of continuity’ in the law: biographies of multiple-positioned lawyers; forms of legal knowledge; institutions and professions in the European field of law. As it looks at European law projects from the margins and peripheries, this new stream of research can transform our understanding of European law which looks less like the ‘cathedral’ often praised by scholars and more like a complex ‘archipelago’, the legal borders and principles of which are uncertain and unequal.

Part II focuses on cases related to tobacco control. Law, rights talk, and litigation have become regular features of tobacco control movements and public health campaigns aimed at reducing tobacco consumption worldwide, including in Japan and Korea. But are they enough to overcome the resource and information disadvantages tobacco control activists face when taking on the industry? Chapter 6 provides historical background on the tobacco epidemic, the multifaceted reasons the tobacco industry remains politically influential in both countries, the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, and recent tobacco control measures—including taxation and pricing, limits on advertising, and new responses to electronic nicotine delivery systems.

The independence of the legal profession suffered immeasurably when the bar associations were dissolved after the 1979 Revolution. They only gradually recuperated and reorganized in the 1990s, being allowed to hold internal elections again in 1997 and regain a degree of political independence. Since the early 2000s, however, hardliners have ensured that regimist lawyers dominate the bars’ boards, with the effect that the human rights work of the bar associations came to a halt. What has undermined the work of the bar associations most, however, is the parallel training and examination mechanisms set up in the judiciary for a different kind of lawyer, so-called Article 187 legal advisors. These do not take a bar exam and also otherwise are not organized by the Bar. They are required to seek renewal of their accreditation from the judiciary every year, thus making them highly dependent on the judiciary’s goodwill.

This chapter focuses on the litigation that followed the tsunami, which hit the Okawa Elementary School. The tsunami resulted in the death of the children visiting the school. The following litigation concerned the question of whether appropriate safety measures had been put in place at the school before the tsunami occurred. The two lawyers leading the litigation for the parents of the children report on how they used innovative approaches in the litigation proceedings. The legal innovation employed concerns the composition of the litigation team, the involvement of the children’s parents, the creation of witness statements addressing the emotional aspects of the disaster, the identification of the entity that should be liable, the doctrine determining liability, digitalisation of litigation and the distribution of risk in modern societies.

Chapter Five examines the role of international law in State Department policymaking. It describes the formal and informal decision-making processes within the State Department, focusing on the influential role of the Legal Adviser and the Legal Adviser’s Office. The chapter then examines closely the weight given by policymakers to legal advice and the nature of the interaction between policymakers and lawyers. Policymakers, at least at higher levels, generally have final decision-making authority, but the views of the Legal Adviser’s Office can be determinative in the relatively rare instances when the lawyers deem a course of action conclusively illegal. Otherwise, the lawyers’ advice is influential, but its weight may vary depending on the circumstances, including the nature of the national interest involved. Many former officials indicated that the development of policy was often a collaborative and constructive process. The lawyers were usually willing to work with policymakers, and they were often willing to find alternative courses of action within the law, though they would not usually budge on an interpretation of the law. Some former officials indicated that their relationship involved greater contestation, resembling a negotiation. When international law conflicted with significant policy interests, policymakers could sometimes seek to overcome those obstacles.

Chapter 6 reconstructs the process of petitioning to the king, once a dispute had set in and the decision to litigate before the highest authorities had been taken. Firstly, the chapter establishes the extent of knowledge and understanding about royal justice among Tudor subjects. Returning to some of the themes set out in Chapter 1, it explores the wider culture of complaint with which all prospective supplicants were familiar, provides evidence for growing awareness of the format required for petitions to the king, and surveys the range of professional legal advice available to produce these documents. The contents of the petitions that litigants and their counsel put together is further explored, with some consideration of the potential for the plaintiff’s ‘voice’ to break through the formula. Finally, the chapter sets out the practical steps required to reach the royal household and to seek out the king himself. Throughout this analysis, bills of costs submitted by Requests’ litigants facilitate further scrutiny of its accessibility, and particularly whether its shift from itinerancy to settlement at Westminster negatively affected its poorest suitors.

This chapter analyses the policies and practices related to resolving investor–state disputes through ISDS. In this area, three broad themes emerged from our data. First, there are practices of forming the defence strategy for specific investment arbitrations and handling ISDS proceedings. The main issue is whether to engage lawyers from private practice and, if so, to what extent. Second, we discuss the matter of coordination and communication between various governance actors during ISDS proceedings. The third issue is that of dispute prevention. Given the stakes, risks, and challenges resulting from ISDS disputes, many governance actors dealing with IIAs realise that dispute prevention is crucial in internalising the IIA disciplines. This section focuses on various training and educative programmes for bureaucrats that were designed, proposed, or implemented to increase the knowledge about and awareness of IIAs within the broad sphere of national governance. We end with a discussion on the blurring of the public–private divide through the engagement of private expertise in the service of the public when defending ISDS cases.

The ethics of both corporate and government lawyers are critically important to the proper functioning of democratic societies. Both groups advise and act for powerful clients: corporations are amongst the most powerful actors in our society because of the potentially far-reaching impact of their activities; governments have ‘powers and obligations that far exceed those of the normal citizen’. In this chapter, we discuss the ethical responsibilities and challenges facing lawyers who act for these clients. We focus predominantly on corporate lawyers, but then turn our attention to lawyers working in government. While government legal work may seem a far cry from the work of corporate lawyers, in fact in-house corporate and in-house government lawyers face some similar challenges and opportunities.