This article explores the creation, circulation, and regulation of informal trade credit or “ograyi” in Afghanistan. The practice of ograyi allows businesses to access short-term credit, from either their suppliers or third parties, to acquire specified goods. This paper provides an account of the non-legal practices that regulate ograyi transactions. Ograyi vitally depends on the development of trust between parties. Clientelism helps to maintain stable relationships that can offset market unpredictability. Widespread market norms and practices establish the general behaviour of participants. Parties also renegotiate the terms of the contract if circumstances make it impossible for the creditor to repay the loan in the agreed timeframe. Furthermore, bank credit remains largely unavailable or unappealing to many businesses, and the legal system provides limited recourse in the case of contractual breach. Thus, the non-legal practices regulating ograyi serve as a substitute for legal coercion.

The coronavirus pandemic has led to millions of deaths around the world. In many countries, it has also exposed long-standing inequities and injustices in health care, income distribution, labour market practice, and social protection for the poor, women, indigenous peoples, and other marginalized segments of the population. The disproportionate casualties among vulnerable populations have also exposed predatory corporate practices, such as the refusal to share vaccine patents with low-income countries (LIC) in the Global South. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned that this “vaccine apartheid” could lead to the further spread of more dangerous forms of virus variants, and that global solidarity and collaboration may be the only viable approach to current and future pandemics.1 Scientists have long warned that the continued destruction of the environment and ecological diversity would lead to future waves of cross-species (zoonotic) viral pandemics, due to the elimination of “natural borders” that once existed between human and non-human species. In the last several decades alone, humanity has suffered from five major zoonotic pandemics: AIDS, SARS, MARS, Ebola, and COVID-19.2 This Special Issue focuses on a select group of Asian countries in order to critically examine the impact of socio-legal inequities in state-centric policies upon domestic populations, including indigenous peoples, and to explore the possibility of international collaborative strategies for controlling the spread of deadly viruses and their variants in the coming years and decades, in Asia and beyond.

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.

In January 2020, Thailand became the first country outside of China to report a coronavirus infection. In July 2020, Thailand was the number one ranked country (out of 184 countries) for its effective handling of COVID-19. In December 2020, the country was hit by a second wave and the government was once again able to contain the new outbreak. In late March 2021, however, a third wave broke out and as of 1 April 2021, Thailand had seen 2,022,117 new cases and a death toll during the third wave of 20,211. The Thai government has not only been unable to contain the virus this time around, but has also failed in its procurement, allocation, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines for its 70 million people. This article will look at the government’s mismanagement of the pandemic in the third wave and how the government is dealing with the current crisis.

This paper purports to study the enormous proliferation of fintech online peer-to-peer (P2P) lending in Indonesia, along with their risks and the prevailing regulations of fintech online P2P lending. This article also suggests a varied spectrum of regulatory actions for regulating online P2P lending as an approach to increase consumer protection and stimulate the growth of Indonesia’s financial inclusion. It highlights the regulative risks and challenges of fintech online P2P lending in Indonesia and has discovered various spectra of regulatory responses that the Indonesian government can practise to regulate this potential industry. Solid recommendations were also given to regulators to better develop the present regulatory framework. This paper adds to the literature on the prevailing practice of online P2P lending by offering a legal outlook involving legal protection and the newly emerging fintech industry from an Indonesian context.

This article interrogates the necropolitical logics of the Israeli settler-state apparatus towards Palestinians in the Occupied Territories during the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines these logics and practices through the prism of coloniality, which conceptualizes manifestations of colonialism (whether material, epistemic, or ontological) as a diffuse set of practices, opening up the conversation to discuss the ways in which international organizations, other states, and the Palestinian Authority continue to inflict the colonial harm through the employment of particular policies. Centring coloniality as an analytic allows a more global perspective and widens the discussion to include the ways in which Palestinians practise decoloniality, building and imagining “otherwise” worlds. This article maps the ways in which the devastation of the pandemic is not a product of the pandemic itself, but larger legacies of material, epistemic, and ontological colonial intervention.

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.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and big data are transforming the credit market around the world. Algorithmic credit scoring (ACS) is increasingly used to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness, using technology to glean non-traditional data from smartphones and analyze them through machine-learning algorithms. These processes promise efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness compared with traditional credit scoring. However, this technology raises public concerns about opacity, unfair discrimination, and threats to individual privacy and autonomy. Many countries in Southeast Asia are introducing ACS in consumer finance markets, although—even with the significant concerns raised—there is an ongoing and concerning lag in oversight and regulation of the process. Regulation is vital to delivering big data and AI promises in the financial services market, while ensuring fairness and public interest. This article utilizes Vietnam, where the lending industry deploys ACS but in a situation of legal limbo, as a case-study to analyze the consequences of this technology. Vietnam is one of the foremost Southeast Asian countries in which ACS usage is spreading rapidly, and this provides an excellent opportunity to review the regulation, or lack thereof, and determine the implications that this may have for other countries that are currently introducing ACS in consumer finance markets. The article concludes with a proposal to regulate ACS in Vietnam based on international regulation and guidelines on ACS, data privacy, and AI to enable a transparent, accessible, and fair process.

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.

Taiwan’s record of preventing infections and deaths from COVID-19 outshines that of almost every other nation, far outstripping the performance of the US, all European countries, and almost all Asian countries. Yet Taiwan is the nation closest to Wuhan, font of the pandemic. Equally importantly, Taiwan’s public health achievement has occurred without the government dictates such as business and residential lockdowns that have aroused controversy and caused economic and psychological distress around the globe. This essay relates the story of Taiwan’s actions during the crucial early months of 2020 and explores the factors—historical, geographical, legal, institutional, strategic, and cultural—accounting for Taiwan’s remarkable success. Prominent among those factors are the legal and institutional infrastructure of preparedness that Taiwan constructed following its unhappy experience with the 2003 SARS outbreak, and the prompt and decisive measures taken upon discovery of the Wuhan outbreak on 31 December 2019. A dialogue between the judiciary and the legislative and executive branches of government following the SARS episode enabled the infrastructure of preparedness to be created through a process consonant with democratic government, respecting principles of individual liberty and fairness. Risk communication techniques were skilfully employed to build public trust in expert advice about measures for infection prevention. Persuasion, not compulsion, was the norm. Cultural factors including customary acceptance of mask-wearing and authoritative advice, and perhaps a high level of risk-aversity, also played an important part. Taiwan’s pandemic control policies have drawn criticism of government overreach. Some recommendations, such as for outdoor masking, bear little rational relation to infection prevention and are best characterized as mere “hygiene theatre.” Nevertheless, early-2020 government measures received a high level of public approval. Taiwan’s successful response to the pandemic illustrates the nation’s nature: a disciplined democracy.

Chinese fintech, initially taking the form as “Internet finance,” is growing rapidly and poses great challenges to its financial regulatory authorities. Acclaimed as a new financial innovation, Internet finance was once accepted and even welcomed by the normally conservative Chinese financial regulators, who simultaneously adopted a wait-and-see strategy, to encourage such innovation and avoid overwhelming regulation. The benevolent regulation stance, however, bred rampant Ponzi schemes or fake financial innovation, resulting in tremendous monetary losses among lots of investors. To show a quick and active response, the central government popped into a whack-a-mole game, starting a four-year campaign of strict Internet finance regulation that has even cracked down on all the P2P lending platforms. This article analyzes the regulatory policy updates of Chinese Internet finance that is transforming to certain kinds of lawful fintech with difficulties, and that adaptive regulatory-organization restructure, regulatory-system optimization, and regulatory-model innovation would be more effective and constructive regulatory options.

This article examines how smart courts enhance the reform of judicial responsibility and the “trial supervision and management” mechanism. It holds that smart courts, while meant to provide better judicial services and improve access to justice, have the additional goal of enhancing the restructuring of accountability and power structures. It argues that automation and digitization help institutionalize and codify political supervision. Smart courts help resolve tension between the two opposing requirements of Chinese courts to maintain legal rationality and independent adjudication on the one hand, and the need for flexibility to allow intervention on the other. This article provides an account of the automation of “trial supervision and management” and explores the role of technology in enhancing political intervention in China’s legal system. This investigation draws on internal court reports and central and local judicial documents, supplemented with a review of Chinese empirical scholarship.

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.

This article first distinguishes three governance scenarios that have been enacted in the COVID-19 pandemic, including identification and control; herd immunity without policy adjustments; and periodic lockdowns and hasty opening. In suggesting how different governments’ strategies were taxonomized into these categories, the paper examines major socio-legal challenges, including variations in social structures and government responsibilities; differences in public health cultures and legal policy options available to governments; unequal distribution of health and social welfare benefits; and public concerns of government overreach in relation to privacy of the infected and the preservation of individual liberty and freedom. Finally, the paper offers critical recommendations in the interest of ensuring a robust social-legal framework for providing adequate medical care to the infected; improving public health for vulnerable groups; ensuring that less privileged countries have access to vaccines; and designing post-disaster reconstruction by seeking global health objectives, rather than state-centric national justice.

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.

The state has historically played favourites—by incentivizing conventional families and clamping down on alternative families like ascetic maths, it ensured that the heteronormative family flourished. I trace the socio-legal histories of families and establish a constitutional imperative for “family equality” located in the rights to religious freedom, privacy, and equal treatment, and propose that it (not marriage equality) drives the queer movement. “Family” must be reimagined beyond marriage in light of the public ethic of care to encompass a vast range of non-normative families like hijra communes. I consider the Canadian Law Commission’s proposals for recognizing “families” and argue that a similar framework is an unrecognized constitutional mandate in India that, once recognized, would render a wealth of laws interacting with family life unconstitutional. The shared socioconstitutional contexts across jurisdictions and the growing convergence of human rights standards could well mean that this will impact legal systems around the world.

This article presents a theory of the order of power to explain the dynamics and interaction between the political and legal orders in China’s courts. This theory posits that the political order is embodied in the extensive administrative ranking system (ARS) of the People’s Republic of China and has a systematic impact on the legal order regardless of the subject matter. The ARS is a system that regulates power relations between various institutional and personal actors in all key power fields, including courts. According to this theory, power, as stratified by the ARS, relativizes law during the processes of legal implementation, application, and enforcement. This theory provides a coherent explanation of judicial behavioural patterns in different subject matters, such as the centralization of criminal investigations in some crimes but not others, the distribution of corruption in China’s courts, and the outcome patterns of administrative litigation. Whilst the conventional wisdom sees that the political and the legal orders in China’s courts are partitioned based on the subject matter, this theory asserts the opposite: the impact of the political order is systemic, comprehensive, and applicable to the entire legal field. This article fills a knowledge gap in Chinese law and politics, where the ARS has received little attention except for recent studies on administrative litigation. The article also identifies two overlooked but distinctive features of the ARS—its multidimensionality and interconnectivity—our understanding of which is disproportionately poor in relation to their significance.

A prevalent assumption is that digital legal databases generate an exhaustive and inclusive archive for academics and legal professionals to use for gathering information. Bridging theories and methods from digital media studies and legal anthropology, I challenge this assumption and demonstrate how digitizing law is a politicized process that is tied to legacies of colonialism and modern epistemic frameworks of law and justice. Employing the concept of legal pluralism, I conduct a comparative study of urban secular state courts and rural Islamic/customary non-state courts (shalish) in Bangladesh to show how the construction of digital legal databases distorts and erases alternate frameworks of law and women’s socio-legal experiences. I discuss two significant use of digital legal databases to highlight why it is important to study the gaps and prejudices: (1) they are central to generating new forms of archives—digital archives; (2) they provide the data sets to help train artificial intelligence and influence automated outputs. I develop the term “neocolonial digitality” to explain how power related to legacies of colonialism and other forms of discrimination are embedded in the digitizing process. This concept also holds space for the newer forms of hierarchies, exclusions, and power structures that digitality permits, focusing on the particular harms marginalized communities encounter in the Global South.

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.