This introduction to the special issue on Buddhism and law lays out an agenda for the socio-legal study of contemporary Buddhism. We identify lacunae in the current literature and call for further work on four themes: the relations between monastic legal practice and state law; the formations of Buddhist constitutionalism; Buddhist legal activism and Buddhist-interest litigation; and Buddhist moral critiques of law. We argue that this agenda is important for advancing Buddhist studies and for the comparative study of law and legal institutions.

This essay explores the extent to which Thailand’s secular legal system reinforces the imagined divide, common in Thai Buddhist conceptions of society, between a “worldly” sphere and the “religious” sphere of the sangha (order of monks). It asks: How far does secular Thai law exclude clergy from the “unmonkly” domains of politics and commerce? It shows that there is a striking discrepancy between the systematic way in which secular Thai law has kept monks from formally participating in “politics” and the rather more permissive way in which it has facilitated participation by the monkhood in the sphere of “commerce.” The essay concludes with some reflections on this finding and the questions it raises.

This article considers the effects of special constitutional prerogatives for Buddhism in Sri Lanka. It argues that, contrary to the expectations of both supporters and opponents, these clauses have not done what they claim to do: they have not enhanced the dominance of Buddhism on the island. Through a detailed analysis of recent legal action, this article demonstrates how special constitutional protections for Buddhism, in fact, aggravate and authorize splits among Buddhists. In making this argument, this article points towards a larger thesis: constitutional provisions designed to ensure the inter-religious dominance of one tradition may, under certain circumstances, actually amplify intra-religious conflicts over the nature, boundaries, and doctrines of that tradition. This work therefore encourages scholars to rethink the assumed polarity between secular-liberal constitutions and religiously preferential ones. Although opposed in their expressive dimensions, religiously neutral and religiously preferential constitutions may in fact generate similar church-state conundrums. The case of Sri Lanka suggests that, in the same way as perfect religious neutrality is impossible, so too is perfect religious supremacy.

Historians have often described early-twentieth-century Japanese Buddhists as ignorant of the importance of religious freedom, myopically focused on their parochial agendas, and sycophantically aligned with the state. Such depictions assume that the attitudes of a minority of elite Buddhist clerics represent majority Buddhist opinion; they also problematically treat religious freedom as a universal principle rather than a historically contingent concept subject to the conflicting claims of competing interest groups. This article highlights the contingency of religious freedom law and the diversity of its interpretation by introducing three discrete attitudes that surfaced in Buddhist responses to a controversial Bill advanced by the Japanese government in December 1899. Tracing differences between statist, corporatist, and latitudinarian interpretations of religious freedom, it shows that religious freedom is never unitary or uniform in any time or place.

This article takes up Talal Asad’s suggestion that studies of law and religion should reject the modern/non-modern binary and instead consider the “fragmented cultures” and “hybrid selves” associated with constantly changing social circumstances. The article begins with a seemingly bizarre incident that occurred during Thai street protests in March 2010. Tens of thousands of rural demonstrators splashed their own blood on Bangkok’s public buildings to curse the ruling government and its legal and political institutions. An explanation of the demonstrators’ controversial actions is found in their reaction against efforts of the central Thai ruling elite over the past century to modernize Thai law, rationalize its religious administration, and eliminate rival systems in outlying regions. These efforts, in turn, are placed in the context of a centuries-old tradition of law, kingship, and religious purification through which Thai rulers centralized their power and demonstrated their legitimacy. The street protests in 2010 represented a failed attempt by rural workers simultaneously to claim their place in the Thai nation and to challenge its hegemony, to assert their rights under modern law, and to invoke pre-modern legal norms and identities.

Myanmar is the only Buddhism-majority country in the world that has developed and maintained a system of family law for Buddhists enforced by the courts. This article considers the construction of Burmese Buddhist law by lawyers, judges, and legislators, and the changes made through legislative intervention in 2015. It begins by addressing the creation and contestation of Burmese Buddhist law to demonstrate that it has largely been defined by men and by its perceived opposites, Hinduism and Islam. Three aspects of Burmese Buddhist law that affect women are then examined more closely. First, Burmese Buddhist law carries no penalties for men who commit adultery, although women may risk divorce and the loss of her property. Second, a man can take more than one wife under Burmese Buddhist law; a woman cannot. Third, restrictions on Buddhist women who marry non-Buddhist men operate to ensure the primacy of Burmese Buddhist law over the potential application of Islamic law. This article deconstructs the popular claim that women are better off under Burmese Buddhist law than under Hindu law or Islamic law by showing how Burmese Buddhist law has been preoccupied with regulating the position of women. The 2015 laws build on this history of Burmese Buddhist law, creating new problems, but also potentially operating as a new source of revenge.

This article critically evaluates the interplay among courts with constitutional jurisdiction in Asia. This is done in the specific context of the Association of Asian Constitutional Courts and Equivalent Institutions (AACC). The article finds that the AACC has to date made only a nominal contribution to cultivating inter-court relations in furtherance of common goals and advances the claim that its members ought to rectify this state of affairs. On the one hand, transnational judicial alliances have instrumental value for participating courts in the discharge of their mandate. On the other hand, the AACC can be a useful conduit in nurturing an Asian perspective to the global judicial discourse on constitutional issues. In that vein, the article identifies the most suitable means to enable the AACC to optimally discharge its role to help advance respect for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in the region.

This article examines how a therapeutic perspective on victim participation has been conceptualized and implemented in criminal trials in Japan after procedural reforms in 2000 and 2008. Findings are discussed with reference to therapeutic jurisprudence studies on victim participation and relevant literature on Japanese criminal justice. Analysis of policy documents, survey data, interviews, and minutes of Ministry of Justice “expert meetings” reveals how the therapeutic needs of victims and the therapeutic effects of victim participation in court proceedings have been understood and conceptualized based on generalized common-sense assumptions of legal practitioners. In court, participants’ reference to victims’ wellbeing and recovery puts pressure on judges to impose harsher punishment than usual, while reinforcing the position of prosecutors. The adopted therapeutic perspective, combined with traditionally expected displays of remorse, furthermore has the effect of limiting the defence’s ability to argue facts and circumstances favourable to the defendant.

Using a socioeconomic rights framework, this article will evaluate government policy relating to housing welfare in Hong Kong. In particular, it will explore the alarming plight of cage tenants in Hong Kong, a highly marginalized group estimated to be as many as 200,000 in number, who live day to day in cramped, dank dwellings averaging 15 square feet in size. It will argue that current government policies are incompatible with the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). It will further look at strategies for domesticating these international human rights treaties. In doing so, this article will contribute to the ongoing debate concerning the legal nature of socioeconomic rights.

Post-1997 Hong Kong under the constitutional framework of “One Country Two Systems” has a political system that may be characterized as a “semi-democracy.” Hong Kong’s constitutional instrument—the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—provides that the ultimate goal of the evolution of Hong Kong’s political system is the election of its Chief Executive by universal suffrage. Since 2003, a democracy movement has developed in Hong Kong that campaigned for the speedy introduction of such universal suffrage. In 2007, the Chinese government announced that universal suffrage for the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong may be introduced in 2017. In 2014, the Chinese government announced further details of the electoral model. The model was rejected by Hong Kong’s Legislative Council in 2015, with the result that the election of the Chief Executive in 2017 would not materialize. This article seeks to tell this story of Hong Kong’s quest for democratization, focusing particularly on the context and background of the “Occupy Central” Movement that emerged in 2013 and its aftermath. It suggests that the struggle for universal suffrage in the election of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017 and the obstacles it faced reveal the underlying tensions behind, and the contradictions inherent in, the concept and practice of “One Country, Two Systems,” particularly the conflict between the Communist Party-led socialist political system in mainland China and the aspirations towards Western-style liberal democracy on the part of “pan-democrats” and their supporters in Hong Kong.