Law Commons^™

Digital Services Trade And Trade Agreements, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Trade agreements have become the main forum for the regulation of digital services trade issues over the past decade. This chapter provides a comprehensive examination of the regulation of digital services trade in trade agreements, first reviewing the rules in the World Trade Organization (WTO), then comparing the approaches between the United States (US), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the European Union (EU), and explaining the reasons for their deep differences. This chapter further analyzes such provisions in trade agreements in Asia and the Pacific, which has become one of the most dynamic regions in terms of new …

Local Action For Animals As A Stepping Stone To State Protections, Jo Anderson

Law

Municipal ordinances can be an effective way to create animal protection laws at the local level, and could lead to great success at the state level. Passing laws at the local level allows people to help animals in their communities, while providing a model for other cities and jurisdictions. Local laws can also create momentum for statewide initiatives, which demonstrates a state’s strong commitment to protecting animals.

Legislation is a key avenue animal advocates use to effect change at scale, but there is not much research about how to choose tractable issues and lobby for them successfully. The goal of …

Secured Transactions Law In Asia: Principles, Perspectives And Reform By Louise Gullifer And Dora Neo, Wee Ling Loo

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Secured Transactions Law in Asia: Principles, Perspectives and Reform is the third in a series of works that critically examine secured transactions law reform around the world. From a focus on reforms in Europe in the first book to reforms in Africa in the second, this third volume looks at Asia, and specifically at reforms in 13 major Asian jurisdictions: China, Indonesia, Japan, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Brunei Darussalam, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Singapore. The collection of essays by leading experts from academia, legal practice and the World Bank Group was first presented at a 2018 conference jointly …

China's Regulatory Crackdowns And U.S.-China Trade And Investment Relations, Henry S. Gao

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

China's regulatory crackdowns have affected U.S. and Chinese companies, but protectionist trade policies implemented by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration have severely restricted the ability of the U.S. government to protect U.S. businesses in the Chinese market. Unless the U.S. government changes course, American companies will be increasingly less able to address perceived wrongs in Chinese government policies and will be placed at a significant economic disadvantage in much of Asia.

Japan’S Transnational War Reparations Litigation: An Empirical Analysis, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

Negotiating war reparations is traditionally the province of the political branches, yet in recent decades, domestic courts have presided over hundreds of compensation lawsuits stemming from World War II. In the West, governments responded to these lawsuits with elaborate compensation mechanisms. In East Asia, by contrast, civil litigation continues apace. This Article analyzes eighty-three lawsuits filed in Japan, the epicenter of Asia’s World War II reparations movement. While many scholars criticize the passivity of Japanese courts on war-related issues, this Article detects a meaningful role for Japanese courts in the reparations process: awarding compensation, verifying facts, and allocating legal liability. …

The Minds Behind The Movement: The Role Of Academics In East Asia’S War Reparations Litigation, Timothy Webster

Faculty Scholarship

East Asia's war compensation litigation simultaneously unites diverse regional actors (lawyers, survivors, activists) and fray international relations (as recent verdicts from South Korea attest). However, one view of the merits of these lawsuits is that they have reconfigured transnational activism in East Asia, exhumed forgotten and suppressed histories of Japanese aggression, and on occasion compensated victims of World War II. This Article highlights the role of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese activists, lawyers and scholars in researching, filing, litigating and appealing over 80 lawsuits between 1972 and the present.

Chapter 8: Information Technology And The New Capitalism, James Bessen

Faculty Scholarship

Harnessing Digitalization for Sustainable Economic Development: Insights for Asia describes digitalization’s role in raising the productive capacities of economies. It examines how digital transformation can enhance trade, financial inclusion, and firm competitiveness, as well as how greater digital infrastructure investment, internet connectivity, and financial and digital education in the region can maximize digitalization’s economic benefits. It also explains the importance of striking the right balance between the regulation and supervision of financial technology to enable innovation and safeguarding financial stability and consumer protection.

Part I of the book seeks to build an understanding of digitalization’s effects on macroeconomic performance, including …

Arbitration By Ssos As A Preferred Solution For Solving The Frand Licensing Of Seps?, Kung-Chung Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In the last decade, the licensing of standard essential patents (SEPs) on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms has been a thorny issue for SEP holders in the US and Europe on the one hand, and major SEP implementers in major Asian economies on the other, such as Japan, Korea, the PRC, Taiwan and even India. With the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), 5G, driverless vehicles, and artificial intelligence (AI), which relies even more on interconnectivity, more and more new standards and SEPs will emerge, and the issue of FRAND licensing of …

Tax Considerations For Funds Structuring In Asia, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Tax considerations play a major role in the decisions of fund managers of where to base their funds. The highly mobile nature of capital has resulted in tax competition, leading to several host jurisdictions for funds in Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, Labuan, and the BVI) having very similar tax characteristics in terms of low effective corporate income tax rates; no capital gains taxes; no exit taxes; a single tier of taxation; and generally no withholding taxes. Other ways in which jurisdictions have attempted to distinguish themselves include a strong Double Tax Agreement network, certainty on the taxation of the carried …

Glocalised Constitution-Making In The Twenty-First Century: Evidence From Asia, Maartje De Visser, Bui Ngoc Son

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

How have Asian nations conducted, or how are they conducting, constitution-making in the face of pressures associated with globalization, and how do they balance those forces with domestic interests and realities? This article aims to develop an analytical framework that can capture this global-local interplay. It introduces the concept of “glocalized constitution-making” to denote the co-existence and relationship between the two governance levels as manifested in the forces, actors and norms pertaining to the process of drafting a new constitution as well as its substance. Glocalization permeates the entirety of a constitution-making episode, from the impetus to initiate the process, …

Hostile Takeover Regimes In Asia: A Comparative Approach, Umakanth Varottil, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

The market for corporate control is animportant corporate governance mechanism for the discipline of corporatemanagers. However, the process and substance of the regulation of hostiletakeovers differs remarkably among various jurisdictions. Existing andinfluential scholarship has focused on the differences in regulation between UnitedStates (US) and the United Kingdom (UK), with the explanations being founded ininterest group politics. Influential as it is, the question is whether thetheory can be extended outside of the US and the UK, particularly to theirlegal transplants in Asia? In the last few decades, many of the Asianjurisdictions have drawn heavily from the US and the UK when …

Sustainable Development: Energy, Justice, And Women, Lakshman Guruswamy

Publications

This article will first offer a functional synopsis relevant to its remit, of the concept of sustainable development (SD) embodied in international law and policy that reflects a tension between economic and social claims as contrasted with environmental protection. While the dominant place acquired by the economic and social dimensions of SD will be recognized, it will argue consistent with the predicate of justice discussed in the article, that the protection of the human environment encompasses the plight of the energy poor and their women and children. Second, the article will delineate the contours of one of the great developmental …

Disruptive Technologies And Sustainable Development: Implications For Southeast Asia, Ching-Fu Lin, Han-Wei Liu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Disruptive technologies, including artificial intelligence, distributed ledger technologies, and the internet of things, are driving a transformative reorganisation of economic structures. If correctly harnessed, these emerging technologies have the potential to assist economies in creating new efficiencies, boosting productivity, and enhancing international trade. This paper explores the scope for these technologies to contribute to sustainable development, highlighting how they could be deployed and implications for Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, and Vietnam.

How Asian Should Asian Law Be? – An Outsider’S View, Ralf Michaels

Faculty Scholarship

Is there an Asian identity of Asian law, comparable to European identity and therefore similarly useful as a justification for unification projects? If so, what does it look like? And if so, does this make Asia more like Europe, or less so? Or is this question itself already a mere European projection?

This chapter tries to address such questions. In particular, I look at a concrete project of Asian law unification—the Principles of Asian Comparative Law—and connect discussions about its Asian identity with four concepts of Asia. The first such concept is a European idea of Asia and Asian law, …

Improving Connectivity Between Asean's Legal Systems To Address Commercial Issues, Locknie Hsu, Pearlie M. C. Koh, Man Yip

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This interim report on legal barriers to doing business in ASEAN coincides with the 50th Anniversary of ASEAN’s founding and the first year of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). The team is privileged to be supported by, among others, the Canada-ASEAN Business Council (CABC), given that it is also the 40th anniversary of dialogue relations between Canada and ASEAN.

Despite occasional misgivings about the “ASEAN Way”, ASEAN economic integration has come a very long way. The number of member States has grown over the 50 years since ASEAN’s founding, and the joint efforts among these States driving economic growth and …

Cross Border Public Offering Of Securities In Fostering An Integrated Asean Securities Market: The Experiences Of Singapore, Malaysia And Thailand, Wai Yee Wan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

In 2015, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) Economic Community was formally established and its aim was to achieve, among other things, an integrated securities market within ASEAN.

Before the formal establishment of the ASEAN Economic Community, in 2009, with a view towards achieving the objective of securities integration, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand adopted the ASEAN Disclosure Standards, a set of harmonized disclosure standards for issuers making cross-border initial public offerings (IPOs). These participating Member States also entered into a framework for the expedited review for cross-listings. However, more than 5 years later, there is no documented use of …

Rethinking Sexual Citizenship: Asia-Pacific Perspectives, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The term 'sexual citizenship' was largely developed in the Anglophone capitalist liberal democracies of the UK, the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The concept is thus inflected by broader understandings of politics in these places. In this article, the author first considers the specificities of 'sexuality' and 'citizenship' in these Anglophone capitalist liberal democracies. She argues that we need to provincialize these local understandings, for configurations of sexuality and citizenship in the UK, North America, New Zealand or Australia are just as contingent and locally specific as they are in the Asia-Pacific region. She then considers whether the term …

Alumni Around The Globe - International Alumni List, New York Law School

At 125 Years

A list of alumni working abroad broken down by country.

Mapping The Trafficking Of Women Across Colonial Southeast Asia, 1600s-1930'S, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

While slavery in the seventeenth century included a substantial traffic in Asian women, it was only in the late nineteenth century that the rise in trafficking in women in Asia came to the attention of international humanitarians who sought to combat this new form of post-abolition slavery. The increasing emphasis on women as slaves, held for the purposes of sexual exploitation, was to a large extent brought to public attention as the result of the enactment of the British Contagious Diseases Ordinance of 1870, which required that women working in prostitution be registered and counted. It was European colonialism in …

Spreading The Word: Using Cookbooks And Colonial Memoirs To Examine The Foodways Of British Colonials In Asia, 1850-1900, Cecilia Y. Leong-Salobir

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The emergence of the British hybrid colonial cuisine in Asia came about as a result of negotiation and collaboration between colonizer and colonized. British hybrid colonial cuisine, comprising unique dishes such as countless varieties of curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash evolved over time and was a combination of elements of British food practices and Asian food ways.

Intellectual Property, Asian Philosophy And The Yin-Yang School, Peter K. Yu

Faculty Scholarship

As an introduction to a special issue on intellectual property philosophy, this article focuses on insights from Asian thought. Such a focus is needed not only to provide balance within this special issue, which includes articles focusing primarily on Western philosophy, but also to highlight the compatibility between Asian philosophy and the notion of intellectual property rights. More importantly, this article aims to demonstrate that Asian philosophy may suggest new ways to address the ongoing and highly complex intellectual property challenges confronting emerging economies and the digital environment.

This article begins by providing a brief discussion of the many different …

Public Health Regulation: Convergence, Divergence, And Regulatory Tension: An Asian Perspective, Locknie Hsu

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Regulatory issues relating to public health, including regulation of access to medicines and tobacco control have increasingly been the source of tension in recent trade and investment negotiations, treaties and disputes. The ongoing Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, which include a number of developing Asian states, are an example that brings some of these issues to the fore and show a divergence of negotiating views.

The intersection between public health regulation and trade and investment treaties has given some Asian states significant pause for thought; it has further led the international system to a critical need to confront the overlap of legal …

Southeast Asia's Maritime Piracy: Challenges, Legal Instruments And A Way Forward, Ahmad Amri

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Piracy is considered a critical maritime security threat in Southeast Asia. Whilst piracy has always been a perennial problem in the region, this threat has received increasing attention over the past few years. Reports published by the International Maritime Organization as well as the International Maritime Bureau show an alarming increase in acts of piracy on Southeast Asian waters over the past decade. In ancient times, the main drivers of piracy were raiding for plunder and capture of slaves; however, in modern times, developments in politics, economics and even military technology have drastically altered the universal crime of piracy. There …

Piracy In Southeast Asia: An Overview Of International And Regional Efforts, Ahmad Amri

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

One of the main maritime security threats in Southeast Asia is Piracy. While piracy has been a perennial problem, this threat has received increasing attention in the region over the past few years. Reports published by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as well as the International Maritime Bureau show an alarming number of piratical acts in Southeast Asian waters over the past decade. Southeast Asia had the second highest number of piracy attacks in the world from 2008–2012. Only the African Region transcended Southeast Asia in the number of attacks. This is concerning because the geographical location of the region …

Book Review: David Walker And Agniezka Sobocinska, Eds. Australia's Asia: From Yellow Peril To Asian Century, Julia T. Martinez

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Australia's Asia is a timely collection that offers an historical background to the recent debates on Australia's Asian Century. As the use of the term 'yellow peril' in the subtitle suggests, there is a strong emphasis in this book on Australia's ongoing anxieties about the rise of Asia.

Dispute Settlement In The Law Of The Sea Convention And Territorial And Maritime Disputes In Southeast Asia: Issues, Opportunities, And Challenges, Lowell Bautista

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) provides for a dispute settlement regime that establishes a compulsory and binding framework for the peaceful settlement of all ocean-related disputes. In Southeast Asia, despite the long-standing myriad of territorial and maritime disputes, there appears to be a general reluctance to utilize the dispute settlement provisions of LOSC. The region has very little experience in international litigation involving territorial and maritime disputes, and a reluctance to utilize the dispute settlement provisions of LOSC.While the LOSC legal framework offers some options, the highly complicated nature of the disputes in …

Combating Maritime Piracy In Southeast Asia From International And Regional Legal Perspectives: Challenges And Prospects, Ahmad Amri

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Piracy is considered a critical maritime security threat in Southeast Asia. Whilst piracy has always been a perennial problem in the region, this threat has received increasing attention in the region over the past few years. Reports published by the International Maritime Organisation as well as the International Maritime Bureau show an alarming increase in acts of piracy on Southeast Asian waters over the past decade. In ancients times, the main drivers of piracy were raiding for plunder and capture of slaves; however, in modern times, developments in politics, economics and even military technology have drastically altered the universal crime …

When Socrates Meets Confucius: Teaching Creative And Critical Thinking Across Cultures Through Multilevel Socratic Method, Erin Ryan

Scholarly Publications

This article presents a case study of adapting the Socratic Method, popularized in American law schools, to teach critical thinking skills underemphasized in Chinese universities and group competency skills underemphasized at U.S. institutions. As we propose it here, Multilevel Socratic teaching integrates various levels of individual, small group, and full class critical inquiry, offering distinct pedagogical benefits in Eastern and Western cultural contexts where they separately fall short. After exploring foundational cultural differences underlying the two educational approaches, the article reviews the goals, methods, successes, and challenges encountered in the development of an adapted “Multilevel Socratic” method, concluding with recommendations …

Introduction: Ways Of Knowing About Human Rights In Asia, Vera C. Mackie

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted on 10 December 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly. We have thus seen 65 years of the international project of addressing human rights issues at a global level through the United Nations and associated organisations. Human rights occupy a paradoxical place in international politics. Human rights treaties address the most intimate issues of personal freedom, autonomy and self-determination, but the institutions developed for the promotion of human rights operate at a global level seemingly distanced from this intimate and individual scale. In human rights advocacy there is thus constant mediation …

Factors Conducive To Joint Development In Asia -Lessons Learned For The South China Sea, Robert Beckman, Clive Schofield, Ian Townsend-Gault, Tara Davenport, Leonardo Bernard

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

Joint development in the South China Sea has been suggested as a solution to the Spratly Islands disputes since the 1980s. China was one of the earliest proponents of ‘setting aside the dispute and pursuing joint development’. The South China Sea Workshops on Managing Potential Conflicts in the South China Sea discussed joint development but ran into a number of obstacles, notably because of longstanding sensitivities over sovereignty issues and conflicting maritime claims. Consequently, the Workshops sought to focus on less contentious issues such as cooperation on marine biodiversity and the safety of navigation. Through this non- confrontational, non-binding and …