Legal transplantation and reform in the name of globalisation is central to the transformation of Asian legal systems. The contributions to Examining Practice, Interrogating Theory: Comparative Legal Studies in Asia analyse particular legal changes in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The contributions also concurrently critically analyse the utility of scholarly developments in comparative legal studies, particularly discourse analysis; regulatory theory; legal pluralism; and socio-legal approaches, in the study of Asian legal systems. While these approaches are regularly invoked in the study of transforming European legal systems, the debate of their relevance and explanatory capacity beyond the European context is recent. By bringing together these diverse analytical tools and enabling a comparison of their insights through Asian empirical case studies, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates concerning legal change and the methods by which it is analysed globally, and within Asia.

Legal transplantation and reform in the name of globalisation is central to the transformation of Asian legal systems. The contributions to "Examining Practice, Interrogating Theory: Comparative Legal Studies in Asia" analyse particular legal changes in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam. The contributions also concurrently critically analyse the utility of scholarly developments in comparative legal studies, particularly discourse analysis; regulatory theory; legal pluralism; and socio-legal approaches, in the study of Asian legal systems. While these approaches are regularly invoked in the study of transforming European legal systems, the debate of their relevance and explanatory capacity beyond the European context is recent. By bringing together these diverse analytical tools and enabling a comparison of their insights through Asian empirical case studies, this book makes an invaluable contribution to the debates concerning legal change and the methods by which it is analysed globally, and within Asia.

This book investigates the key factors shaping corporate governance in China and presents a sophisticated study of corporate governance in China from a comparative and historical perspective. Drawing on extensive corporate governance literature, this book articulates why path dependence theory is the most effective framework for interpreting the development path of Chinese corporate governance. Chenxia Shi reviews the historical role of government in commercial development and regulation in dynastic China and in early corporate law-making, followed by an account of China’s legal and economic development over the last three decades. This historical inquiry identifies government control as the key feature of economic and market regulation in China. In particular, this book canvasses the evolution of governance of State-Owned Enterprises and listed companies, major corporate governance problems, regulatory challenges posed by China’s increasing participation in economic globalization, and enforcement difficulties particularly in relation to investor protection, directors’ duties and accountability. Ultimately, Political Determinants of Corporate Governance in China demonstrates that corporate governance in China is largely determined by political imperatives and those political imperatives have been shaped and re-shaped in a historical process.

Law and legal institutions in East Asia's high-growth episodes -- Conclusion: East Asia, law and development, and today's developing countries -- Chapter 4: A new China model for the era post global financial crisis: Legal dimensions -- Introduction -- The East Asian model, its progeny and their problems -- The emerging post Washington, post Beijing consensus (PWBC) -- Implications of the PWBC for the China model -- The decision in light of the PWBC -- The implications of the decision for legal reforms -- Conclusion

This book is a critique of the rapidly changing nature of legal education in major Asian jurisdictions as diverse as Afghanistan, Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam. It provides cross-country comparative material, including western legal education systems, and particularly detailed coverage of Japan.

"Practicing law" has a dual meaning in this book. It refers to both the occupational practice of law and the practicing of transplanted laws and institutions to perfect them. The book constitutes the first monographic work on the legal history of Republican Beijing, and provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the practice of law in the city of Beijing during a period of social transformation. Drawing upon unprecedented research using archived records and other primary materials, it explores the problems encountered by Republican Beijing’s legal practitioners, including lawyers, policemen, judges and criminologists, in applying transplanted laws and legal institutions when they were inapplicable to, incompatible with, or inadequate for resolving everyday legal issues. These legal practitioners resolved the mismatch, the author argues, by quite sensibly assimilating certain imperial laws and customs and traditional legal practices into the daily routines of the recently imported legal institutions. Such efforts by indigenous legal practitioners were crucial in, and an integral part of, the making of legal transplantation in Republican Beijing. This work not only makes significant contributions to scholarship on the legal history of modern China, but also offers insights into China’s quest for modernization in its first wave of legal globalization. It is thus of great value to legal historians, comparative legal scholars, specialists in Chinese law and China studies, and lawyers and law students with an interest in Chinese legal history.

This book discusses court-oriented legal reforms across Asia with a focus on the creation of ‘new courts’ over the last 20 years. Contributors discuss how to judge new courts and examine whether the many new courts introduced over this period in Asia have succeeded or failed. The ‘new courts’ under scrutiny are mainly specialist courts, including those established to hear cases involving intellectual property disputes, bankruptcy petitions, commercial contracts, public law adjudication, personal law issues and industrial disputes. The justification of the trend to ‘judicialize’ disputes has seen the invocation of Western-style rule of law as necessary for the development of the market economy, democratization, good governance and the upholding of human rights. This book also includes critics of court building who allege that it serves a Western agenda rather than serving local interests, and that the emphasis on judicialization marginalises alternative local and traditional modes of dispute resolution. Adopting an explicitly comparative perspective, and contrasting the experiences of important Asian states - China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Thailand and Indonesia - this book considers critical questions including: Why has the ‘new-court model’ been adopted, and why do international development agencies and nation-states tend to favour it? What difficulties have the new courts encountered? How have the new courts performed? What are the broader implications of the trend towards the adoption of judicial solutions to economic, social and political problems? Written by world authorities on court development in Asia, this book will not only be of interest to legal scholars and practitioners, but also to development specialists, economists and political scientists.

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.

This book stems from a symposium held at the Faculty of Law of the National University of Singapore in honour of the pioneer in the field of legal pluralism, Professor M.B. Hooker. It gathers essays from admirers and friends who add their own contributions on legal pluralism, transnationalism and culture in Asia. The book opens with an account of M.B. Hooker colourful and prolific career. The authors then approach legal pluralism through legal theory, legal anthropology, comparative law, law and religion, constitutional law, even Islamic art, thus reflecting the broad approaches of Professor Hooker's scholarship. While most of the book focuses mainly on Southeast Asia, it also reaches out to all of Asia up to Israel, and even includes a chapter comparing Indonesia and Egypt.

This book provides a comprehensive, comparative assessment of legal developments in China and Vietnam, examining similarities and differences, and highlighting the factors likely to promote, change or resist the spread of the Chinese model.