In many countries, the size of a law firm is closely related to the specializations and incomes of the lawyers it employs, and can be considered an index for disparities among lawyers. Gender and school prestige may affect the size of the first firm that lawyers join. Moreover, since the lawyer population has quadrupled over the last 20 years in Japan, mainly due to judicial reform, I hypothesize that this population increase has changed how gender and school prestige affect the size of the first firm law school graduates decide to join. To test this, I conducted a secondary statistical analysis on the effect of gender and school prestige on the size of the first firm that lawyers joined, using survey data collected by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations in 2010. Findings suggest that there were no significant differences in the size of women’s and men’s first employer, but that school prestige was significant. Moreover, the importance of school prestige has increased over the years.

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.

The Madras High Court located in Chennai, India, was established in 1862 when India was under colonial rule. It continues to exist in post-independence India after merging into the Indian legal system. In this study, I argue that the architecture and judicial iconography of the Madras High Court building reflects a recurring historical tension between Indian and British concepts of justice. This is continually reflected in the semiotics of the legal space of this high court which in turn influences the legal consciousness of the court personnel who utilize this space. This architecture and iconography of the Madras High Court constitutes, preserves, and reinforces the ambivalent legal consciousness of those who created, occupy, and visit this space. The contemporary legal consciousness of the court personnel is thus seen to have deep historical roots.

Since May 2009, public participation in the criminal justice system, known as saiban-in seido (trial system by lay judges), has been implemented in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the law-making process of the saiban-in system and present an evaluation of the system from the perspective of deliberative democracy. This paper concludes that, contrary to criticism from those who want to introduce a purer form of jury trial dominated by lay jurors, the current saiban-in system, which mixes three professional judges with six saiban-ins, should be viewed positively from the perspective of deliberative democracy.

This article provides critical and analytical views on legal regulation to achieve a balance between FinTech innovation, risk prevention, and financial stability, by focusing on the trend of FinTech firms entering the financial-services industry and the associated regulatory and legal challenges that are already arising in China. It adopts a balanced approach as a theoretical-analysis perspective, weighing various considerations, and proposes the policy option of FinTech regulation under the principle of interest balance. The analysis aims to contribute new insights to an ongoing debate in China on the relationship between legal and regulatory reform, FinTech innovation, and risk prevention. This article argues that legal challenges, rather than technical problems, remain the key obstacles to effective FinTech regulation. Our proposed hypothesis seeks to explain how a legal regulation achieves balancing the competing interests between FinTech innovation, risk prevention, and financial stability in the booming of China’s FinTech. Finally, this article proposes the implementation of goal-oriented responsive regulation by improving the legal framework of FinTech regulatory regimes through policy option.

This paper focuses on the roles of formal rules (laws) in institutional emergence, sustenance, crisis, and transition based on an examination of the Meiji Restoration and the Xinhai Revolution. It describes how formal rules in the polities of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were enforced, supplemented, or modified by the strategic interactions among the ruler, the intermediate organizations, and the peasantry. It then discusses how the strategic complementarities between the ruler and the intermediate organizations were transformed into strategic rivalries in response to changes in the economic and foreign environments, resulting in the demise of dynastic rule in each country. The post-transition constitutional design was affected by the ways in which the strategic reconfigurations had led to the demise of the dynastic rulers. This historical narrative suggests that formal rules per se do not necessarily create institutions in the sense of an integral pattern and process of social behaviour and ideas. A formal rule can function as a substantive form of an institutional process if, and only if, it mediates between a recursive state of strategic interactions among agents and individual belief formation in order to sustain the social order.

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.

In 2017, the Taiwanese Constitutional Court handed down Judicial Yuan Interpretation No. 748, which was a ruling in favour of same-sex marriage. The Court also ordered the national legislature to amend the law within two years. Despite a significant backslide in the Taiwanese 2018 referendum, the legislature eventually followed the Court’s order and legalized gay marriage in 2019. This victory made Taiwan the first state to legalize same-sex marriage in Asia. Many legal scholars consider the same-sex marriage ruling a progressive decision in which the Court undertook a counter-majoritarian task of protecting a minority group. While we agree with the Court’s role in promoting marriage equality, we contend that most legal scholars overlook an important question in this dynamic: the legislature had had several chances to settle this issue over the past decades, so why did it refuse to draft gay-marriage legislation but later, in 2019, defer to the Court’s decision? In this paper, we explain the political foundations of an activist judiciary by using the case of the first gay-marriage legislation in Asia. We argue that the risk of position-taking on tough issues leads incentive-facing political elites to engage in position avoidance and to see the political value in deferring to a high court’s ruling. Using original data, we present evidence of how Taiwan’s diverse constituency relative to the same-sex marriage issue influenced legislators’ position-avoidance behaviour and led them to dodge political backfire by delegating policy-making authority to the Constitutional Court.

Drawing on textual and ethnographic research conducted over the last five years, this article analyses an important genre of judicial practice in South and Southeast Asia that has been almost entirely ignored by socio-legal scholars: Buddhist systems of judging. Using the judicial system of one monastic group in contemporary Sri Lanka as a case-study, it argues that Buddhist judging requires more than just the internalization of moral principles, as is often assumed. According to Buddhist (monastic) principles of judging, legal procedures—similar to those used in state legal settings—are equally essential. These procedures govern everything from making legal complaints, to the structuring of trials, to determining jurisdiction, and many other topics. By examining Buddhist judicial systems, this article not only casts new light on the pluri-legal landscape of Asia; it also offers new reflections on the intersection of religion-based and state-based systems of law in the contemporary world.

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.

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.

This article examines the government-funded legal aid system of Bangladesh. It indicates that the Bangladeshi legal aid system is lacking in terms of both legal provisions and the actual performance of the Legal Aid Services Act. The inadequacies in the implementation of the Act even raise the concern of whether the government has any intention to use the legal system to improve the condition of the poor or whether it intends to establish a legal aid system that is directed to providing mere lip service to the poor. The Bangladeshi legal aid system is therefore in a paradox; the state has established an institution that exposes its drawbacks and is not able to meet the needs of the beneficiaries. The article finally makes recommendations in order to redress the deficiencies of the system and thus to ensure effective access to justice for those who are in need of the service.

This paper investigates how culture affects people’s attitudes towards directors’ duties in the People’s Republic of China by surveying a sample of Chinese business executives. If cultural practices lead people to behave differently from what the law prescribes, it is a serious regulatory oversight. Our results suggest that Chinese cultural values do matter when it comes to the perception of breaches of directors’ duties. Specifically, we find that respondents who identify with moral-discipline related traditional Chinese values are more lenient to the chairman breaching his director's duties, whereas respondents who subscribe to modern Chinese values are less receptive to the director failing to report the chairman’s contravention of his director’s duties. These results suggest that it is imperative for China’s law-makers to rethink their approach to regulating directors’ duties instead of the wholesale transplantation of laws from Western countries.

This article examines how Thai courts of the first instance deal with run-of-the-mill criminal cases. How do judges deal with criminal trials of a rather routine nature, often involving defendants from ethnic minorities and reflecting the particular conditions in the provinces concerned? Drawing on participant observation and interview research conducted mainly in two provinces in different regions of the country, the article examines the challenges faced by judges and court officials in dealing with heavy caseloads in a highly bureaucratized system where acquittal rates are extremely low. How far do such cases shed light on how judging is carried out in the majority of Thai courts? What kind of challenges do Thai judges face in adjudicating minor but often messy cases in order to fulfil societal expectations in line with their own understandings of justice?

This article examines the constitutional nature of the Malaysian monarchies in their social context. We discuss the evolution of the monarchies through pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial history, and account for their survival despite several attempts to curb their powers, including restriction of the royal assent and sovereign immunity. It is argued that the powers of the monarchies respond to their historical role and social embeddedness of the monarchies, stretching the role of the Rulers beyond the Westminster norms as set out in constitutional texts. Moving to contemporary issues, we see the assertion of the right to uphold the Constitution in relation to prime-ministerial appointments, and acting on advice. Here, the monarchies reflect a braiding of both traditional elements and Westminster constitutional norms.

The purpose of this study is to show how the Japanese government has created laws with harsher punishment since the 1990s. While a tendency toward harsher punishment is common in advanced Western countries, a similar tendency in Japan has prompted scholarly discussion on whether it can be understood through the “penal-populism” framework. However, it lacks in systematic evidence. This study presents three findings that differ from previous studies through a quantitative analysis of legislation with harsher punishment. First, while previous literature argues that the legislation increased in the latter half of the 1990s, this study shows that it peaked in the middle of the 2000s. Second, while previous literature argues that the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Justice promote the legislation, this study shows that it is caused by every ministry’s drafting Bills. Third, this study shows that it does not quantitatively avoid partisan conflicts, contrary to the prediction of the “penal-populism” theory.

The mediation of disputes by community leaders in China has deep historical roots and has long been among the responsibilities of neighbourhoods and villages. While most research on the topic has looked at cities, mediation is in fact more common in the countryside. This paper draws on a survey conducted in 2002 (n=2,164) and repeated in 2010 (n=2,659), covering 23 villages in five provinces, which provides detailed data on conflict from disputants themselves. We examine the evolution of this much-debated mode of conflict resolution and assess its prevalence and effectiveness relative to alternatives. We find that, even as overall rates of disputing declined, seeking intervention by village authorities remained as common a response to disputes in 2010 as it was eight years prior. The paper thus sheds light on a primary means through which the party-state has tried to maintain stability, tamp down strife, and assert its primacy at the community level.

“Developed” states tend to reflect their own development experience in their dealings with “less developed” states, encouraging replication of their own solutions and processes. This is “recursive” law and development (LAD). This article examines the role of Singapore in LAD processes in the ASEAN region. It finds that Singapore’s LAD efforts are recursive and focused on rule-of-law and governance training, including especially anti-corruption methods. These are conducted not via a special agency, but via co-operation that is multilevel, multidimensional, and untrumpeted. LAD can learn lessons from this approach.