Existing literature has highlighted the importance of recognizing health fraud offenders’ intentional manipulations of victims’ vulnerabilities. However, the manipulation tactics of health fraud have received little attention. This study aims to extend the current understanding of health fraud by incorporating the concept of emotional labour. Nested in the Chinese context, which owns the most populous ageing population, three sets of qualitative data were collected, including 13 semi-structured interviews, 233 judicial documents, and 197 media reports. The findings suggest that health fraud offenders utilized three types of emotional labour as means of committing crime: including the labour of anxiety relief, the labour of filial piety, and the labour of social networking. This article not only provides novel insights into understanding health fraud, but also contributes to introducing the concept of emotional labour in criminological and socio-legal studies.

The Indian Supreme Court has long enjoyed an almost mythic reputation for progressive and creative jurisprudence, but a series of recent scandals is beginning to erode this well-settled authority. One of the most troubling of these incidents has been an allegation of sexual harassment and intimidation by a Court staffer against then sitting Chief Justice of India (CJI) Ranjan Gogoi. This article draws on media analysis and ethnographic research conducted in the immediate aftermath of the “CJI Scandal” to explore what it means for judges and judging in contemporary India. I argue that the justices’ response to the allegations are part of a broader shift in Indian judging. Far from being the product of an institution imbued with mythic qualities, judging in India is increasingly coming to represent an example of mythos, or “an assertive discourse of power and authority … something to be believed and obeyed.”

The product of an internationalized peace process, Cambodia’s 1993 Constitution restored the monarchy and endowed the Crown with a political safeguarding role that successive kings have been unable to fulfil in practice. After a brief survey of the tragic modern history of Cambodia’s monarchy, this paper outlines the formal constitutional role of the king, highlighting the central dichotomy between the provisions that promise that the king “shall reign but shall not govern” and those that provide the king a more active role as “guarantor.” The paper highlights how this fundamental ambiguity has been borne-out publicly, by focusing on a handful of specific instances in which both King Sihanouk and King Sihamoni are understood to have been strategically absent from the country to avoid signing controversial legislation. Short of providing a veto power in the legislative process, the king’s safeguarding role is shown to manifest in the symbolic denial of royal legitimacy.

This paper analyses how the legal consciousness of Chinese enterprise managers has transformed in the face of drastic changes brought along by major events in socialist China. During the past 70 years, there have been in place a series of radical and pervasive changes in the legal framework constituted by a communist system frequented by mass political campaigns, trailed by a massive liberalized move towards a market economy. By building upon the thesis of legal-consciousness narratives suggested by Ewick and Silbey, this paper discusses how Chinese managers have evolved through various states of “With the Law,” “Against the Law,” and “Under the Law” legal consciousness. It is suggested that, in the coming era of globalization under socialist China, Chinese enterprise managers may start to embrace a new narrative of legal consciousness—“In the Law”—by participating more actively in the socialist system with Chinese characteristics.

Along with China’s economic downturn, there has been an increase in the size of China’s underground lending market. The mounting risk in connection with this underground lending market triggers tremendous interest and debates over appropriate and effective regulatory responses. Because of its private and non-transparent character, the underground lending market is likely to confound those seeking to find “black letter” law governing its regulatory framework. Instead of relying on its conventional tighten-up strategy—using the muscle of the Criminal Law—China has orchestrated an experiment by allowing local legislation to formalize part of the underground lending market, as well as a judicial approach by recognizing a higher interest rate charged by underground lenders to borrowers. This article tries to understand the underlying rationale of regulatory and judicial movements through both law and society, and law and finance lens.

In this article, I evaluate the status of law and economics in Japan from 1990 to 2016. Through the literature review, we can see distinctive features that did not exist in 1990: the establishment of the Japan Law and Economics Association, change in methodologies, increase in empirical research, expansion of research fields, and influencing policies and statutes in the real world. I then conduct case studies about how law and economics research in Japan offers policy recommendations. I present two examples: repeal of protection of short-term leases and establishment of fixed-term building leases. Finally, I explore the outlook of the next stage of law and economics in Japan. More emphasis on empirical research and more English publications on law and economics in Japan are important to move to the next stage.

Court mediation is now playing a crucial role in the Chinese legal system. Based on two case studies in Yunnan Province, this paper examines how court mediation works in Southwest China. It finds that court mediation can expand the capacity of the court concerning case acceptance, and is capable of fixing multicentre disputes and complicated social problems. However, the paper also points out that when encountering some ill-suited cases, justice may be undermined and the judge’s role may be confused. Therefore, it is necessary to pass some law to exclude the ill-suited cases from the mediation track when promoting court mediation in Southwest China.

Since the first Asian Law and Society Conference (ALSA) was held at the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2016, a number of special sessions have been organized to focus on the deconstruction of the Westphalian transnational order based on the concept of the “nation-state.”1 This dominant hegemony was predicated on the congruence of the geo-territorial boundaries of both the state and the nation, as well as the “assumed integration” of state-defined “citizenship” and another distinctly layered “membership” based on culture, ethnic, religious, and indigenous affiliations. The “nation-state” ideology has thus masked a history of tensions and conflicts, often manifested in the form of oppression, persecution, and genocide directed at the nation and its peoples by the state and its predatory institutions. Our studies have shown that such conflicts between the nation and the state have been observed in multiple regions in Asia, including Kashmir in India; Moro and Islamic communities of Mindanao in the Philippines; Karen, Kachin, and other autonomous nations in Myanmar; West Papua, Aceh, Kalimantan, South Moluccas, Minahasa, and Riau in Indonesia; Kurds in multiple state systems of Iraq, Syria, Turkey, and Iran; and Palestine in Israel, among many other culturally autonomous nucleated communities in Asia and across the world.2 The phrase “the nation and the state” was specifically chosen to distinguish and highlight the unique conflictual histories of two geo-political entities and to provide a fundamentally differing interpretation of history, geography, the role of law, and global affairs from the perspectives of nation peoples, rather than from that of the state or international organizations, as traditional analyses do. The Westphalian “nation-state” hegemony led to the inviolability of the state’s sovereign control over the nation and peoples within a state-delimited territory. The state then began to engage in another predatory project: to strengthen and extend its international influence over other states and, thus, the nations within these states, by adopting new constitutional provisions to offer cross-border “citizenship” to diasporic “ethnic-nationals” and descendants of “ex-migrants” who now inhabit foreign states. The nations have similarly capitalized on constitutional activism by erecting their own Constitutions to explore collaboration with other nations, as well as diasporic populations of their own, in order to carve out a path toward the nations’ independence within, and even beyond, the respective state systems. The “constitutional” activism sought by the state and the nation has become an important political vehicle with which to engage in possible collaboration with diasporic “ethno-nationals” and ex-migrant communities, in order to further assert political influence and strengthen trans-border politics of the state and the nation. Three articles included in this issue investigate such constitutional activism of cross-border politics and transnational collaborations in Asia, the Americas, Europe, and other regions across the globe.

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.