This book, authored by three-time National Book Award winner Jim V. Lopez, helps unveil the answers to the nagging conundrum: Why do most family businesses experience a meltdown once they reach the third generation? Family Business Law Declassified: How to Beat the Third-Generation Curse reveals numerous traps that cause family businesses to falter and eventually sink into the cesspool of irrelevance and insolvency. It also offers best practices and countervailing measures to cushion the impact of the “Buddenbrooks Phenomenon,” thus helping family businesses transcend the obstacles associated with the third generation.

Each article in this book, by itself and in tandem with the other articles, tries to depict social capital in action. Social capital is the key wherewithal crucial to the development and progress of countries and communities.

In this collection of articles and essays, the author confronts a wide range of issues--among them, constitutional theory, adjudication, legal hermeneutics, bar exams, marriage, psychological incapacity, free speech--and takes a nonconventional and, at times, critical view of standard legal discourse and prevailing social institutions.

Much writing on politics in Asia revolves around the themes of democracy and democratisation with a particular focus on political systems and political parties. This book, on the other hand, examines the role that parliaments – a key institution of democracy – play in East, Southeast and South Asia including Taiwan and Hong Kong. Parliaments in these locations function in a variety of historical, political and socio-economic circumstances with different implications for institution building and political development. This book examines questions like how accessible, representative, transparent, accountable and effective are parliaments? To what extent are parliaments able to hold other political actors to account or how far are they constrained by the political environment in which they operate? Going further, this book considers how new media such as the Internet and other social platforms, through providing avenues for individuals to articulate their views separate from official channels, are influencing the ways parliaments work. To stay relevant, parliamentarians need to reach out and engage these individuals in formulating, deciding and fine-tuning policies. In the information age, being a parliamentarian has become more challenging and how a parliamentarian copes with this change will shape the nature and pace of political development.

The book takes a look at the six most important current topics arising from copyright law in the information society, and for each topic provides an in-depth introduction that compares the approaches taken in Europe and the US. Each topic is introduced by an expert, and the issues are then analysed in separate country reports representing nine Asian jurisdictions: China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. The six topics are: The Expansion of Copyright Law and its Social Justification: Introduction by Reto Hilty, Max Planck Institute, Munich Internet Trade, Digital Works and Parallel Imports: Introduction by Christopher Heath, European Patent Office, Munich The Collective Exercise of Copyrights: Introduction by Kung Chung Liu, Academia Sinica, Taiwan The Law on Anti-Circumvention and Digital Rights Management: Introduction by Andy Sun, National Chenchi University, Taipei, Taiwan and Zhi Wei, Peking University, Beijing Copyright Contracts, Public Policy and Antitrust: Introduction by Estelle Derclaye, Queen Mary University of London Contributory and Vicarious Liability for Copyright Infringement: Introduction by Andy Sun, National Chenchi University, Taipei, Taiwan