More than a decade ago, before globalization became a buzzword, Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth established themselves as leading analysts of how that process has shaped the legal profession. Drawing upon the insights of Pierre Bourdieu, Asian Legal Revivals explores the increasing importance of the positions of the law and lawyers in South and Southeast Asia. Dezalay and Garth argue that the current situation in many Asian countries can only be fully understood by looking to their differing colonial experiences—and in considering how those experiences have laid the foundation for those societies’ legal profession today. Deftly tracing the transformation of the relationship between law and state into different colonial settings, the authors show how nationalist legal elites in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and South Korea came to wield political power as agents in the move toward national independence. Including fieldwork from over 350 interviews, Asian Legal Revivals illuminates the more recent past and present of these legally changing nations and explains the profession’s recent revival of influence, as spurred on by American geopolitical and legal interests.

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Law is a cutting-edge and comprehensive resource which surveys the interdisciplinary field of Asian Law. Written by an international team of experts, the chapters within cover issues as diverse as family law and Islamic courts, decentralisation and the revival of traditional forms of law, discourses on the rule of law, human rights, corporate governance and environmental protection The volume is divided into five parts covering: Asia in Law, and the Humanities and Social Sciences; The Political Economy of Law in Asia - Law in the Context of Asian Development; Asian traditions and their transformations; Law, the environment, and access to land and natural resources; People in Asia and their rights. Offering an overview of the full spectrum of Law in Asia, the Handbook is an invaluable resource for academics, researchers, lawyers, graduate and undergraduate students studying this ever-evolving field.

The study of Asia and its plural legal systems is of increasing significance, both within and outside Asia. Lawyers, whether in Australia, America or Europe, or working within an Asian jurisdiction, require a sound knowledge of how the law operates across this fast-growing and diverse region. Law and Legal Institutions of Asia is the first book to offer a comprehensive assessment of eleven key jurisdictions in Asia - China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei Darussalam, Singapore and the Philippines. Written by academics and practitioners with particular expertise in their state or territory, each chapter uses a breakthrough approach, facilitating cross-jurisdictional comparisons and giving essential insights into how law functions in different ways across the region and in each of the individual jurisdictions.

This book offers a comparative analysis of traditional Asian legal systems. It combines methods from legal history, legal anthropology, legal philosophy, and substantive law, pursuing a comprehensive approach that offers readers a broad perspective on the topic. The geographic regions covered include the Near East, Middle East, Central Asia, India, China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. For each region, the book first provides historical and political context. Next, it discusses major milestones in the region’s legal history and political institutions, as well as its forms of government. Readers are then presented with fundamental principles and terms needed to understand the legal arguments discussed. The book begins with the Ancient Near East and important topics such as Jewish law. The next part considers Islamic law, while also exploring modern issues. The third part focuses on Hindu and Buddhist law, while the fourth part covers China and Japan. The book’s closing section examines tribal societies, e.g. Mongols, Pashtuns and Malays. Topics covered include the interaction of legal systems within a legal circle, inter-systemic interactions, reasons for the failure and success of legal modernization, legal pluralism, and its effects on Asian societies. Family law, law of obligation, criminal law, and procedural law are also explored.

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, British rule transformed the relationship between law, society, and the state in South Asia. But qazis and muftis, alongside ordinary people without formal training in law, fought back as the colonial system in India sidelined Islamic legal experts. They petitioned the East India Company for employment, lobbied imperial legislators for recognition, and built robust institutions to serve their communities. By bringing legal debates into the public sphere, they resisted the colonial state's authority over personal law and rejected legal codification by embracing flexibility and possibility. With postcards, letters, and telegrams, they made everyday Islamic law vibrant and resilient and challenged the hegemony of the Anglo-Indian legal system. Following these developments from the beginning of the Raj through independence, Elizabeth Lhost rejects narratives of stagnation and decline to show how an unexpected coterie of scholars, practitioners, and ordinary individuals negotiated the contests and challenges of colonial legal change. The rich archive of unpublished fatwa files, qazi notebooks, and legal documents they left behind chronicles their efforts to make Islamic law relevant for everyday life, even beyond colonial courtrooms and the confines of family law. Lhost shows how ordinary Muslims shaped colonial legal life and how their diversity and difference have contributed to contemporary debates about religion, law, pluralism, and democracy in South Asia and beyond.

Introduction Intellectual property rights foster innovation. But if, as it surely does, “intellectual property” means not just intellectual property rules—the law of patents, copyrights, trademarks, designs, trade secrets, and unfair competition—but also intellectual property institutions—the courts, police, regulatory agencies, and collecting soc- ties that administer these rules—what are the respective roles of intellectual property rules and institutions in fostering creativity? And, to what extent do forces outside intellectual property rules and institutions—economics, culture, politics, history—also contribute to innovation? Is it possible that these other factors so overwhelm the impact of intellectual property regimes that it is futile to expect adjustments in intellectual property rules and institutions to alter patterns of inno- tion and, ultimately, economic development? It was to address these questions in the most dynamic region of the world today, Asia, that we invited leading country experts to contribute studies that not only summarize the current condition of intellectual property regimes in countries ranging in economic size from Cambodia to Japan, and in population from Laos to China, but that also describe the historical sources of these laws and institutions; the realities of intellectual property enforcement in the marketplace; and the political, economic, educational, and scientific infrastructures that sustain and direct inve- ment in innovative activity. A.

This is a book for an extraordinary time, about a pandemic for which there is no modern precedent. It is an edited collection of original essays on Asia's legal and policy responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in a matter of months, swept around the globe, infecting millions. It transformed daily life in almost every corner of the planet: lockdowns of cities and entire countries, physical distancing and quarantines, travel restrictions and border controls, movement-tracking technology, mandatory closures of all but essential services, economic devastation and mass unemployment, and government assistance programs on record-breaking scales. Yet a pandemic on this scale, under contemporary conditions of globalization, has left governments and their advisors scrambling to improvise solutions, often themselves unprecedented in modern times, such as the initial lockdown of Wuhan. This collection of essays analyzes law and policy responses across Asia, identifying cross-cutting themes and challenges. It taps the collective knowledge of an interdisciplinary team of sixty-one researchers both in the service of policy development, and with the goal of establishing a scholarly baseline for research after the storm has passed. The collection begins with an epidemiological overview and survey of the law and policy themes. The jurisdiction-specific case studies and cross-cutting thematic essays cover five topics: first wave containment measures; emergency powers; technology, science, and expertise; politics, religion, and governance; and economy, climate, and sustainability. Chapter 20: Cambodia: Public Health, Economic, and Political Dimensions by Ratana Ly, Vandanet Hing, & Kimsan Soy is available for free.

Law of the Sea in East Asia selects the most prominent maritime legal issues that have emerged since the post-LOS Convention era for a detailed discussion and assessment. The current marine legal order in East Asia is based on the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention) and accordingly coastal states in the region are obliged to cooperate amongst themselves to exercise their rights and perform their duties. Keyuan, a respected expert in the fields of international and Chinese law, explores issues concerning compliance with the law of the sea, territorial disputes and maritime boundary delimitation, fishery management, safety of navigation and maritime security, and neglected issues in the law of the sea. This is the first book to examine maritime laws in East Asia, and as such will appeal to academics of law and Asian studies, lawyers and policy makers.

Comparative constitutional law is a field of increasing importance around the world, but much of the literature is focused on Europe, North America, and English-speaking jurisdictions. The importance of Asia for the broader field is demonstrated here i

Legal education systems, like legal systems themselves, were framed across Asia without exception according to foreign models. These reflect the vestiges of colonialism, and can be said to amount to imitating the style and purposes of legal education typical in Western and relatively "pure" common law and civilian systems. Today, however, we see Asian legal education coming into its own and beginning to accept responsibility for designing curricula and approaches that fit the region’s particular needs. This book explores how conventional "transplanted" approaches as regards program design as well as modes of teaching are, or are on the cusp of being, reimagined and discerns emerging home-grown traces of innovation replacing imitation in countries and universities across East Asia.