This paper asks how globalization relates to legal culture. It argues that there exists, at least in the developed world, a general global culture; it follows, then, that there must be a global legal culture as well. Not everyone in modern societies is completely drawn into the global legal culture, however, as the research of the David and Jaruwan Engel in Thailand suggests. In general, however, the legal cultures of modern, developed societies are strongly convergent. In particular, there is emerging a global and convergent culture of human rights. Some Asian scholars and political figures have argued that conceptions of fundamental human rights are culturally Western, and may not suit the cultures of the East. The paper argues, however, that the human rights culture is not “Western” so much as modern; it arose in the West, but it is no more unsuitable to Asian societies than the automobile and the computer, which also arose first in the West.

The present paper reviews some conclusions deriving from a series of works by a historian of medieval Western law and justice who has applied comparative analysis to the Chinese world. It points to the distance between the two civilizations, in terms of the concept of a “debt of justice” owed by the state, the autonomy of the judicial power, and judicial ethics. It opens a debate on the cultural elements that define the judicial truth-making process in various legal systems.

This paper focuses on the roles of formal rules (laws) in institutional emergence, sustenance, crisis, and transition based on an examination of the Meiji Restoration and the Xinhai Revolution. It describes how formal rules in the polities of Qing China and Tokugawa Japan were enforced, supplemented, or modified by the strategic interactions among the ruler, the intermediate organizations, and the peasantry. It then discusses how the strategic complementarities between the ruler and the intermediate organizations were transformed into strategic rivalries in response to changes in the economic and foreign environments, resulting in the demise of dynastic rule in each country. The post-transition constitutional design was affected by the ways in which the strategic reconfigurations had led to the demise of the dynastic rulers. This historical narrative suggests that formal rules per se do not necessarily create institutions in the sense of an integral pattern and process of social behaviour and ideas. A formal rule can function as a substantive form of an institutional process if, and only if, it mediates between a recursive state of strategic interactions among agents and individual belief formation in order to sustain the social order.

Since 1990, successive waves of foreign experts have introduced legal transplants into Cambodia dealing with the possession, use, and ownership of land. The Land Law of 2001, sponsored by the World Bank, first created a registration system that made land ownership dependent exclusively on a central cadastral registry. The 2007 Civil Code, sponsored by the Japanese International Cooperation Agency, subsequently cast doubt on the exclusivity of the registry by declaring it only presumptive evidence of ownership. Both laws are based on foreign models that presume economic, technical, and professional resources that Cambodia, as a very poor, post-conflict country, lacks. Despite recent efforts to reconcile the laws, implementation remains uneven and legal ambiguity persists. While it is too early to make conclusive judgments, the Cambodian experience brings into question not only the wisdom of top-down foreign intervention but also the desirability of any form of centralized formal legal construction in a society without the necessary social, political, and institutional prerequisites.

The Chinese judicial system has long been influenced by a populist legal ideology that prioritizes public accountability and political legitimacy over professional autonomy. In recent years, however, the Chinese legal profession has begun to mobilize collectively, albeit episodically, to challenge this populism. Drawing on legal documents, interviews, media reports, and online discussions, this paper provides a scholarly analysis of the Li Zhuang case in 2009−11, in which the fate of an individual criminal defence lawyer was linked with the main ideological conflict in China’s legal system and the highest-level political struggles in the Chinese state. It demonstrates that, although populism remains an intimidating force in China’s judicial practice, lawyers, scholars, and other legal professionals may be laying a foundation for collective solidarity to pursue professionalism through their mobilization against populism.

In many countries, the size of a law firm is closely related to the specializations and incomes of the lawyers it employs, and can be considered an index for disparities among lawyers. Gender and school prestige may affect the size of the first firm that lawyers join. Moreover, since the lawyer population has quadrupled over the last 20 years in Japan, mainly due to judicial reform, I hypothesize that this population increase has changed how gender and school prestige affect the size of the first firm law school graduates decide to join. To test this, I conducted a secondary statistical analysis on the effect of gender and school prestige on the size of the first firm that lawyers joined, using survey data collected by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations in 2010. Findings suggest that there were no significant differences in the size of women’s and men’s first employer, but that school prestige was significant. Moreover, the importance of school prestige has increased over the years.

This paper extends the empirical analysis on the determinants of judicial behaviour by measuring the ideal points for the Justices of the Philippine Supreme Court for 1986−2010. The Philippines is an interesting case given the US influence in designing the Supreme Court while the political and social context differs significantly. The estimated ideal points allow us to focus on political coalitions based on presidential appointments. We find strong evidence to support the existence of such coalitions along a government-opposition policy space. Implications for comparative judicial politics are discussed.

Burmese colonial history suggests that a legal system cannot operate independently from the felt needs of the people who are supposed to obey the law. Despite a monopoly of force for many decades, the British failed to create a sustainable legal system in Burma. Colonial status shifted Burma’s economic role from subsistence agriculture to the generation of large-scale exports. By undermining the traditional Burmese legal system and substituting Western international standards of property rights, enforceability of contracts, and an independent judiciary—all attributes of what some consider to be the “Rule of Law”—the legal system amplified and channelled destructive economic and social forces rather than containing them. This paper examines traditional Burmese law, the administration of law in British Burma, and the consequences of the new legal system for the country and its own stability. The paper concludes by suggesting lessons for Myanmar today, and for the study of the “Rule of Law.”

This paper investigates how culture affects people’s attitudes towards directors’ duties in the People’s Republic of China by surveying a sample of Chinese business executives. If cultural practices lead people to behave differently from what the law prescribes, it is a serious regulatory oversight. Our results suggest that Chinese cultural values do matter when it comes to the perception of breaches of directors’ duties. Specifically, we find that respondents who identify with moral-discipline related traditional Chinese values are more lenient to the chairman breaching his director's duties, whereas respondents who subscribe to modern Chinese values are less receptive to the director failing to report the chairman’s contravention of his director’s duties. These results suggest that it is imperative for China’s law-makers to rethink their approach to regulating directors’ duties instead of the wholesale transplantation of laws from Western countries.

This paper analyzes how activists used a parliamentary petition to overcome legal and political barriers and mobilize openly for gay rights for the first time in Singapore. Unlike societies where rights mobilization has political legitimacy, exercising and claiming rights in the de facto one-party state are non-conformist behaviours and face greater limitations. Gay rights activists in Singapore not only struggle with the state and their opponents over the right to equality; compared to their counterparts in liberal democracies, they also have to overcome stronger restrictions on political access and civil-political liberties that enable or protect rights mobilization. This paper therefore describes and analyzes a politics of rights under authoritarian conditions and the complicated consequences of legal resistance and rights mobilization. Although the petition campaign transformed collective grievances, expanded activists’ support base, and opened up new tactical possibilities, it also provoked intense, third-party opposition and foreclosed other avenues of mobilization.