This article offers a typology of comparative law research and assesses the state of this body of research in one Asian country – the State of Israel. To identify the work that should be considered ‘comparative’, I classify studies into three groups. Following a short overview of Israel's political and legal system, I assess the ways comparative public law is addressed in the country. Relying on a first-of-its-kind quantitative study of Israeli legal scholarship in English in the field of public law that compares at least two systems, the article shows that the compared systems in Israeli comparative legal research are predominantly western, and that materials from the United States by far outweigh all other sources. The article then considers several possible reasons for the limited gaze eastwards and beyond the United States, granting special attention to the cultural ‘Americanization’ of Israel. Directions for future research are considered in the conclusion, including the expansion of the findings from public law to other fields of law; the comparison of these findings with those of similar systems in Asia and beyond; and the possible ways legal education may promote the development of eastern-bound comparative exercises.

This article addresses three questions. First, what is the effect on the civil law in Asia of young (and old) academics adopting English, the language of the common law, as a second language – rather than a civil law language, either a Continental European language (French, German etc), or another Asian civil law language (Japanese, Chinese etc)? Second, what is the effect on the civil law of civil law jurists pursuing their graduate studies not only in English but also in common law jurisdictions, rather than in civil law jurisdictions and returning home to become academics or practicing lawyers in civil law jurisdictions? Finally, since English is the lingua franca of civil law jurists in Asia, how can we adapt English to the civil law so as to make English one of our civil law languages?

This article considers whether the academic inquiry of comparative constitutionalism in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan may be further developed by a full consideration of the relevance of social movements. Integrating social movement theories into comparative constitutional law, this article argues that a more nuanced positive account of the creation and consolidation of constitutionalism in these East Asian polities must be situated within the engagement of social movements in discursive venues for formal and informal constitutional change.

This article compares the Korean and Japanese jury systems, evaluating the performance of jury trials as reflected in empirical studies in these countries, and identifying some innovative practices in Korean and Japanese systems that can be adopted by other jurisdictions. This comparative study of Korean and Japanese jury systems will also address common problems and investigate different approaches to those problems. At this juncture, numerous existing empirical studies conducted in both countries provide a good framework for comparison. Although jury trials are firmly entrenched within the Korean and Japanese legal systems, there are several common challenges faced by each country that uses lay juries: avoidance of bias, judicial oversight and intervention for reasoned decision-making, importance of rationality in the jury deliberation process, etc. A careful analysis of the Korean and Japanese experiences will provide useful guidance to not only policymakers in Asia but also criminal justice scholars around the world.

Chinese court cases have attained increasing importance in recent studies of Chinese law, but remain insufficiently understood. In this article, I demonstrate why Chinese court cases should be given more weighty consideration in comparative studies involving Chinese law as a comparator, and how such cases, particularly ‘Guiding Cases’ and ‘Gazette Cases’ (which are published in the official Gazette of the Supreme People's Court), should be properly dealt with and assessed in view of the complexity of the court case system in China.

The duty of loyalty has been notoriously vague since its introduction into Japanese law. The vagueness of the duty becomes particularly problematic because although the duty overlaps with the duty of care, a breach of each of the duties is subject to different remedial rules. By focusing primarily on duties owed by a trustee and agent, this article attempts to re-define the duty of loyalty and clarify the conceptual relationship between the duties of loyalty and care in Japanese law. The article first explains the current complexity in the scope and nature of the duty of loyalty, and the relationship between the duties of loyalty and care in corporate, trust, and agency laws in Japan. Second, borrowing ideas from Lionel Smith's account of the fundamental nature of the fiduciary duty, this article attempts to re-shape the concept of the duty of loyalty while properly differentiating it from the duty of care in Japanese law.

Exposure to foreign law is immensely valuable as it expands students’ argumentative and analytical terrain. More pragmatically, there has been a discernable shift towards rule-of-law thinking in furthering regional integration and a flurry of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) involving Asian countries. Law schools ought to capitalize on this reality. The preferred educational strategy to adopt, we argue, entails systematically integrating foreign law across the traditional components that make up undergraduate curricula. Asian law schools should simultaneously offer general comparative courses that train students in comparative methodology and theory, enabling them to become discerning consumers of and sensible contributors to comparative research, including in the context of domestic law reform. In advocating such mainstreaming of foreign law, we further suggest a broad understanding of this notion as encompassing all rules that do not have their origins in the municipal legal order, including those produced by regional organizations like the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). Unlike Europe's law schools, which have been laggards in adapting law school curricula to changes in their wider regional environment, Asia's law schools have the opportunity to anticipate the growing relevance of foreign law in practice and thereby ensure that they remain germane to the legal industry and society at large.

Singapore aims to be a legal service hub for its region and, therefore, aims to provide legal services to the civil law countries of Southeast and East Asia. One would therefore think that the teaching of at least the rudiments of the civil law (the law of obligations – contracts, delictual liability (tort), quasi-contracts – and property) would be a high priority. However, for all its talk of being ‘Asia's Global Law School’, the NUS Law School does not train its students to handle work from, or in, most of this region. The students are simply not required to learn the very foundations of the civil law tradition. The requirement that they take a course entitled ‘Legal Systems of Asia’ does not ensure that they know the very basics of the civil law. The fact that they must take a course on the law of a civil law country does not ensure that they learn about the civil law. This article suggests how the NUS Law School can make sure that it prepares its students, or at least some of its students, for regional work that includes civil law work.

This article explores what makes the teaching of comparative law distinctive as well as familiar in Singapore (and Southeast Asia more broadly), and so contributes to a process of comparing the teaching of comparative law. I argue that one must balance both familiarity and distinctiveness when teaching comparative law in Southeast Asia. This means that, on the one hand, we can indeed draw on general and even classical materials when teaching comparative law in this region. On the other hand, there is the need to address specific features that shape the context of Southeast Asia. Finally, I discuss how the Southeast Asian example may be instructive because of this balancing in highlighting the importance of teaching comparative law in other parts of the world.

The classic method of teaching comparative law produces students who depend only on course materials. They may gain knowledge of different aspects of the laws and legal systems of various other countries, but find it difficult to conduct research and write on comparative law independently. This paper discusses comparative law teaching methods by examining the experience of teaching comparative criminal law in the Master's Programme in Law at the Faculty of Law, Universitas Indonesia. Although it was once sufficient for students to understand comparative law and some aspects of criminal law, the course's learning outcomes have since changed: students are also expected to have the ability to conduct research and write on comparative law upon completing the course. For this shift to take root, several changes are necessary: first, students must become more active in their learning and do more than just receive knowledge passively from course materials provided by their lecturers; second, students should seek out more reference materials beyond the syllabus and learn to use libraries and online databases more effectively; and third, students must improve their mastery of English and other languages, if possible.

This article addresses the role of legal research methodologies in the development of legal science and the creation of social change in Indonesia. Based on fieldwork conducted at Indonesian law schools between 2014 and 2016, this article reveals that legal research methods taught in Indonesia are starkly divided into normative-juridical and empirical-juridical approaches. Misunderstandings between adherents of these different schools of thought pose significant obstacles to the development of interdisciplinary approaches to law that span or go beyond the divide. Methodological conflicts resulting in the absence of socio-legal approaches in Indonesian law schools, coupled with outdated and limited source materials, limit the study of comparative law in Indonesia to the mere comparison of statutes and rules shorn of socio-political context. They also fail to instill awareness of the importance of considering social – on top of legal – impact in the context of Indonesia's complex and pluralist legal system.