Since 2017, Japan has rapidly developed its hard and soft infrastructure to accelerate the use of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in Japan, such as establishing the Japan International Dispute Resolution Center and the Japan International Mediation Center, Kyoto, as well as amending the Foreign Lawyers Act. The legislative process to amend the Japanese Arbitration Act is underway and discussions to accede to the Singapore Convention are ongoing. Mediation and settlement discussions involving judges during the litigation process are traditionally common in Japanese court practices, which would have some implications for investor–state mediation, which is a recent hot topic in the field of investor–state dispute settlement. Numerous means of further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of ADR proceedings have been discussed globally, including mid-stream conferences, Calderbank offers, the use of mediation in complex disputes, and the advanced use of Arb-Med-Arb proceedings utilizing party-appointed arbitrators.

The unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic has caused restrictive measures to be established in many sectors including the legal and judicial sector; an example is the use of electronic litigation systems and video-conferencing facilities for trials. With the implementation of changes in the legal and judicial sector to adapt to restrictions arising from the pandemic, there is the question of whether the current rules governing civil-court proceedings are designed to accommodate these changes. This article seeks to explore the measures taken by courts in response to the pandemic with a focus on Asia, notably Singapore. The article will outline the legal basis for the use of live video links for the purpose of witness evidence-taking under Singapore law and the possible implications will be reviewed taking Singapore’s civil proceedings as an example in comparison with other jurisdictions.

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, including the use of dispute funding by well-resourced corporates and dispute-finance products for companies. It explains funding for insolvency-related claims and funding for the enforcement of awards and judgments. Finally, it provides two case-studies in which funding provided access to justice and enabled the funded party to recover a non-performing loan in multiple jurisdictions.

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 provisions within recent Syrian legislation. It aims to understand the position of arbitration in Syria between existing national and international law frameworks for dispute settlement and to assess the potential for establishing independent, transparent, and efficient tribunals to resolve disputes arising out of ongoing conflicts that have plagued the country since 2011. If arbitration proves to be a mechanism for ordering the peaceful settlement of postwar disputes within and concerning Syria, parties, practitioners, and stakeholders must employ perspectives that include and are capable of navigating Syria’s existing arbitration landscape.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing trend in Chinese arbitration reform that emulates international norms and practices. This article examines some of these key reform measures and major challenges to their implementation. It explores in both legal and practical terms why most of these reform techniques may remain largely ineffective, showing that engaging in international norms and standards in China can be highly challenging due to their potential illegality, the general lack of institutional capacity to sustain them, and the conflicts of local ideas about the purposes of arbitration. It is thus doubtful whether commitment to satisfying the formal requirements prescribed by the legal reforms would often prevail. When it does, it is questionable whether this form of commitment would become prevalent and how it could proceed in a sustainable and coherent manner from a practical perspective.

Independent directors (IDs) in listed Japanese companies have gradually increased with the transplant of the Western model of the monitoring board. In practice, however, IDs act more like the mediating hierarch in team production theory than the agent of the shareholders, albeit with a number of differences from Blair and Stout’s seminal model. Japanese IDs mediate formally and informally, resolving vertical disputes between groups of executives as they contest control of the company. Given the norm of lifetime employment, such vertical disputes are common in Japanese companies and are economically significant, since failure to resolve them can result in destruction of firm-specific human capital. The article explores the scope for mediating hierarchy in Japanese law and corporate governance practice, then develops three case-studies which highlight the role played by IDs. Their practice is shaped by and supports social norms that emphasize the importance of continuity in team production.

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” and the alleged cultural neutrality of contract law as a legal discipline. The paper argues that the PACL project lacks clarity. Its ambitious objectives, while apparently intelligible, fail to produce the desired results in their entirety: the Asian regional harmonization of contract law turns out to resemble its occidental forerunners. The study goes beyond the traditional comparative law. It explores the model law (in the making) in a broader context of legal policy, parallel regional private-law-making efforts in the field of contract law as well as in the context of legal globalization.