The world can no longer deny that the planet is on the verge of an Anthropocene catastrophe. As scientists from different fields and from around the globe are discussing the causes, impacts, challenges, and solutions to the arrival of this human-induced new geological time, the field of law cannot remain behind. Rights of Nature (RoN), granting legal personhood to nature and its elements such as rivers

It will be familiar to many that the environmental emergency of our times generates a number of difficulties for our thinking of law and society. It is argued in this essay that the languages of place-making make some sense of these predicaments. The essay proceeds through the close reading of an Extinction Rebellion protest and two landmark judgments. The protests, and their policing, are keyed to

The scale and urgency of the consequences of the Anthropocene for human civilization call for comprehensive responses from human societies. As leaders in law, law schools have a role in helping their respective societies respond to the impacts of the Anthropocene. The present analysis discusses potential approaches to help law schools in Asia integrate the Anthropocene into their legal education curricula

When Japan signed the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, the government enacted a new act to deal with international parental child abduction according to the Convention in the same year. The Ministries of Justice and Foreign Affairs were immediately in charge of making a draft Bill. Once the government and respective ministries had instantly set up the legal and

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

This paper focuses on the conflict of norms in the interface between the “transplanted” formal law and the local social norms in the land-law reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar, each representing different legal families, while sharing commonness in that both have attempted law-making in the post-colonial independence period in order to restore the basis of the livelihoods of the local population. Both

What types of institutional dynamics and conditions allow constitutional resilience in the face of attempts at undermining gains in a constitutional democracy? Using Sri Lanka as a case-study, I claim that the legal complex acting in synergy with independent public institutions (the Speaker of the Parliament) and civil society can produce constitutional resilience. Synergy between the legal complex

This article explains third-party dispute finance, including practical issues relating to the funding process and how to choose a funder. It examines some of the social benefits of funding and its importance in an economic downturn, and looks at some of the risks of dispute finance. It also considers the regulation of dispute finance in various Asian jurisdictions, as well as recent industry trends

The place of arbitration within the Syrian legal system has received scant academic and professional attention, and as such, remains largely unstudied. Shedding much-needed light on the nature of arbitration in Syria as a resilient form of ancient customary Arab alternative dispute resolution, this contribution appraises the salient features of the Syrian Arbitration Law 2008 and arbitration-related

This paper investigates how individuals such as judges, lawyers, clients, and court staffers as well as institutions are elevating litigation costs in Bangladesh in multiple ways. It explores how the existing law and procedures as well as key institutions further promote case delay. It also examines the ways in which police departments and the prosecution contribute to elongate criminal trials and

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

In May 2018, Artidjo Alkostar retired from the Supreme Court of Indonesia after a judicial career spanning almost two decades. Over this period, he presided over many of Indonesia’s most prominent and controversial criminal cases and became renowned for routinely rejecting corruption appeals and increasing prison sentences. In the celebratory publications that marked his retirement, Alkostar was held

The Principles of Asian Contract Law (PACL) are the most recent addition to the series of uniform laws regarding transnational commercial contracts. This time, the harmonization initiative must address the problem of a great variety of legal traditions, all of which are quite difficult to reconcile. The author focuses on the object and objectives of the PACL by reconsidering the notion of “Asian law”

This article assesses the responsibility of local governments in Indonesia for the management of refugee care, following the enactment of Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (the “PR”). It highlights the limited authority of local governments in handling refugee issues—which is an issue that cuts across several national legal and administrative regimes including

Article 28G(2) in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution reflects a human rights approach to asylum; it guarantees “the right to obtain political asylum from another country,” together with freedom from torture. It imposes an obligation upon the state to give access to basic rights to those to whom it offers asylum, following an appropriate determination procedure. By contrast, in Presidential Regulation No

In this Introduction, Indonesia’s approach towards refugee protection is contextualized historically and regionally in light of the enactment of Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR). In particular, we describe the legal and policy framework for refugee protection in Indonesia and analyze its underlying norms and values, including the constitutional right

This article analyses the “local turn” in refugee governance in Indonesia through a comparative case-study of two cities: Makassar and Jakarta. It compares how these two cities have responded to the obligations to provide alternative accommodation to detention, imposed upon them by the Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees (PR). While the shift to non-custodial

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

This article explains the extent to which Indonesia has international obligations to comply with the non-refoulement principle in the absence of ratification of the 1951 Refugee Convention. While Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees provides the general impression that Indonesia respects the non-refoulement principle, there is no specific text within Indonesian

In recent times, religious nationalism has emerged as a major basis for identity and mobilization. In Asia, religious nationalism specifically challenges existing pluralist approaches to constitutional government, which have generally been seen as necessary to ensure peaceful coexistence. The increasing alignment of religious and national boundaries has the worrying capacity to neutralize the “cross-cutting

In this article, I argue that religious nationalism poses a unique challenge to the liberal theory of religious freedom. In arguing this, the article first develops and defines an ideal type of religious nationalism through an analysis of Hindu-nationalist and religious Zionist thought. I show that religious nationalism in states like India and Israel have the unique status of intimate rivals. They

This article highlights the convenient excuse of (il)legality used by (1) religious majoritarian mobs to justify attacks against places of worship and religious buildings of minorities; and (2) police and local authorities to absolve themselves of the failure to uphold public order and the rule of law, protect religious minorities, and to punish religious minorities. This article traces the emergence

This article explores the creation, circulation, and regulation of informal trade credit or “ograyi” in Afghanistan. The practice of ograyi allows businesses to access short-term credit, from either their suppliers or third parties, to acquire specified goods. This paper provides an account of the non-legal practices that regulate ograyi transactions. Ograyi vitally depends on the development of trust

In this paper, I want to focus on some aspects of the political process in India that have an impact on the treatment of religious minorities. Much of the discussion on multicultural jurisdictions deals with differentiated citizenship rights that allow religious groups to maintain their normative universe. This literature shows the tensions surrounding individual and group rights. I want to approach

Triggered by the sense of crisis, the Thai state and Thai Buddhism are renewing their traditional relationship kindled by the monarch-led reform over a century ago. Thai Buddhism is reviving its lost aura and hegemony while the political conservatives are looking for legitimacy and collective identity in a time of democratic regression. The result is the rise of the Buddhist-nationalistic movement

Earlier studies have examined the discriminatory effects of laws and policies against the adherents of indigenous beliefs—Aliran Kepercayaan—in Indonesia. However, those studies do not show how the politics of law were developed through the prior sociopolitical processes in Indonesia’s legislative history. This study analyzes how and why the government initiated and later put an end to discrimination

T. H. Marshall’s 1950 seminal work shows that the granting of civil, political, and social rights leads to the institutionalization of rules binding the state and its citizens. In practice, however, citizenship goes beyond these unproblematized paternalistic relations. It is political, involving connection, competition, and conflicts. Isin and Turner (2002) propose that “citizenship” should be examined

This article assesses the implementation of Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees and how it relates to different kinds of bureaucratic labelling of refugees as it unfolds in Indonesia’s region of Kupang. From a politico-historical perspective, Kupang is a useful case-study for elucidating the policy implications of the labelling of refugees, as the region has

Due to their success in routine tasks such as voice recognition, image classification, and text processing, extensive attention has been aroused on how to use artificial intelligence (AI)-based automation tools in the judicial-trial process to improve efficiency. Meanwhile, judicial trial is a complex task that requires accurate insight and subtle analysis of the cases, law, and common knowledge. Applying

Artificial intelligence (AI) and law is an AI research area that has a history spanning more than 50 years. In the early stages, several legal-expert systems were developed. Legal-expert systems are tools designed to realize fair judgments in court. In addition to this research, as information and communication technologies and AI technologies have progressed, AI and law has broadened its view from

This is an overview article regarding artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential normative implications. Technology has always had inherent normative consequences not least due to AI and the use of algorithms. There is a crucial difference between algorithms in a technical sense and from a social-science perspective. It is a question of different orders of normativity—the first related to the algorithm

A new paradigmatic shift in confronting the climactic endgame of the Anthropocene in Asia is in order. Scientific studies warned that Asia would become the epicentre of anthropogenic catastrophes and environmental disasters in the world. As the outgoing Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) president, I wish to contribute to critical discussions on two issues: (1) Earth Jurisprudence and (2) the

Conducting the research, finishing the final draft, and then reflecting on the research and writing processes, whether on a conference panel or in print, often feel like disjunctive exercises. By the time this series of commentaries is published, at least eight years would have passed since my first visit with LGBT rights activists of Myanmar. I have moved on to new projects and walked with other people

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

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

The paths to digital justice focus on the challenges of contemporary digital societies in reaching automated decision-making processes through software, algorithms, and information technology without loss of its human quality and the guarantees of due process. In this context, this article reflects on the possibilities of establishing judicial robots in substitution for human judges, by examining whether

Since its inception in 1957, Malaysia’s Federal Court (FC) has often been embroiled in high-profile decisions that have dramatically shaped the rule of law and constitutional practice in Malaysia. Recent political change has renewed hope that the FC can reassert its early role as an independent and impartial arbiter of political conflict. This paper investigates determinants of the FC’s behaviour since

In the interstices of international law, quite a number of states have developed strategies to reach out to and engage with their diasporic populations or ethnonational kin outside of their borders who are not their citizens but citizens of the state in which they habitually reside. Some states even provide for that kind of policy in their Constitutions. Some states grant preferential treatment and

This article rethinks the hegemonic “sex-work” discourses—popular sex-work discourse and radical-feminist discourse—that associate Japanese night work with prostitution and consider young women workers in this industry as victims. These discourses reinforce sex-work oppression–empowerment paradigms, which limit workers’ experiences to either oppressive/empowering, good/bad, and positive/negative. This

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

The relationship between state and absent citizens is becoming more important since the globalization of the 1990s. Countries usually try to increase the number of their citizens through two methods. The first is by increasing the number of nationals living abroad using a dual-nationality system. The second is by expanding national power through dual culturalism. These methods increase the international

Historical tensions and conflicts have existed between the nation and the state across the globe for centuries. These antithetical geo-political entities have also erected Constitutions of their own to assert their sovereignty and independence. The paper then explores the constitutional activism by the nation to attain its sovereignty and the right to self-determination from the state supervision.

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

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

There is no specific law in Nepal that directly criminalizes sex work. However, many sex workers have experienced arbitrary detention by law-enforcement authorities. The Human Trafficking and Transportation (Control) Act, 2007 (HTTCA) criminalizes pimps and clients, but not sex workers directly. However, the Act was overinclusive and often criminalized women engaged in voluntary sex work. The new Criminal

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

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

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

In the 1990s, Japan officially launched its first legal-assistance projects in Asia, becoming the first Asian donor to offer bilateral assistance in the legal field in the post-Cold War profileration of rule-of-law assistance movements. This paper reviews the process of re-shaping the Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) policies in Japan leading up to the adoption of the ODA Charter in 1992 and its

“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

This paper suggests that Afghanistan’s fractured plural legal system is beginning to show some signs of cohesion and coherence. I briefly describe the aspiration set out in the Constitution of Afghanistan and its mandate to legislators and jurists to harmonize Islamic jurisprudence, the principles of justice, customary norms, and international treaty obligations. I then discuss some of the setbacks

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

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

The indigenous and Fourth World communities in multiple Asian regions are again making noises. As the incoming ALSA president, I wish to offer a new perspective called the Fourth World Approaches to International Law (FWAIL) to understand the nature of pandemic indigenous people’s struggles for independence in Asia, to examine sociopolitical and historical roots of regional conflicts around many Asian

This article focuses on the war on drugs in the Philippines in order to explore issues related to extra-judicial killing, which remains common in many countries that have abolished the death penalty and in many more that retain it but seldom carry out judicial executions. In the first year of Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency (2016–17), thousands of people were killed by police or by vigilantes who were

This article addresses the dilemmas and compromises in legal practice around the issue of child marriage in Indonesia. Although the government set development goals that include ending child marriage and complying with human rights standard, it is facing considerable resistance. We researched the state legal system and law in practice to understand this resistance, finding that: (1) law-making in family

The general, but false, perception of migrant smuggling through Indonesia, a large, archipelagic country, is that smugglers operate entirely on their own. In fact, the more complex smuggling operations rely on broad networks of foreign organizers as well as local intermediaries and ground staff. In 2011, the Indonesian legislature introduced a severe minimum sentence for any involvement in migrant

The concept of restorative justice emerged from efforts to find an alternative to the traditional punitive, retributive reaction to crime. The belief that face-to-face meetings are able to address the diverse needs of all involved parties has eventuated in the proposal of an informal process to discuss the aftermath of crime. One local district court in Korea was very keen to test this process and

A central aspect of Thai legal consciousness since the mid-twentieth century, widely shared among the general population, has been a perception that judges have an exalted status entitling them to make broad-ranging pronouncements about social and political issues as well as legal matters. Popular legal consciousness of the Thai judge has to a large extent been shared by the judges themselves, as well

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