This article highlights the convenient excuse of (il)legality used by (1) religious majoritarian mobs to justify attacks against places of worship and religious buildings of minorities; and (2) police and local authorities to absolve themselves of the failure to uphold public order and the rule of law, protect religious minorities, and to punish religious minorities. This article traces the emergence of legal violence in the form of anti-mosque vigilante extremism in Myanmar from 2012 onwards and analyzes cases of attacks against: (1) “illegal” mosques; (2) madrasas being used as or reconstructed into mosques; (3) buildings allegedly being constructed as mosques; (4) private homes and public spaces being used as mosques; and cases of (5) closed mosques not being allowed to reopen. The author primarily used Myanmar-language resources as well as interviews to conduct the research.

Article 28G(2) in Indonesia’s 1945 Constitution reflects a human rights approach to asylum; it guarantees “the right to obtain political asylum from another country,” together with freedom from torture. It imposes an obligation upon the state to give access to basic rights to those to whom it offers asylum, following an appropriate determination procedure. By contrast, in Presidential Regulation No. 125 of 2016 concerning the Treatment of Refugees, the Indonesian government’s response to asylum seekers and refugees is conceptualized as “humanitarian assistance,” and through a politicized and securitized immigration-control approach. We argue that the competition between these three approaches—the human right to asylum, humanitarianism, and immigration control—constitutes a “triangulation” of asylum and refugee protection in Indonesia, in which the latter two prevail. In light of this framework, this article provides a socio-political and legal analysis of why Article 28G(2) has not been widely accepted as the basis of asylum and refugee protection in Indonesia.

Since the fall of socialism in Eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and some states of Southeast Asia, the international financial institutions and individual donor states have initiated wide-scale legal-aid programmes to assist these states in their transition from socialism to a market economy. Whereas the aid from financial institutions vis-à-vis recipient states is often agreed upon specific conditionalities, the donor states design their foreign legal aid according to individual preferences, although sometimes with references to universal goals. Currently, various donor states provide legal aid to Uzbekistan. Given the fact that Uzbekistan is the former Soviet Republic that still bears multiple traces of a socialist legal system and additionally integrates indigenous informal law, this research provides an analysis of how different donor states base their legal-aid activities on entirely different philosophies and levels of gravity, and how receptive the hybrid structure of Uzbekistan’s law is towards such aid.

Earlier studies have examined the discriminatory effects of laws and policies against the adherents of indigenous beliefs—Aliran Kepercayaan—in Indonesia. However, those studies do not show how the politics of law were developed through the prior sociopolitical processes in Indonesia’s legislative history. This study analyzes how and why the government initiated and later put an end to discrimination against adherents of Aliran Kepercayaan—at least in the realm of population administration. Under the New Order era, political battles gave birth to the politics of law discriminating against the Aliran Kepercayaan adherents. Weakening political resistance in the Reformasi era as well as judicial review before the Constitutional Court forced the government to partially relax its discriminatory laws and policies. Nonetheless, progressive initiatives from secular nationalist parties have yet to be taken in order to further ensure equality for all minority—religious—groups within Indonesian society before the law.

How do dignity discourses shift the framing of struggles for basic legal freedoms? Based on our decade-long empirical research on lawyers and politics in China, we provide a theoretical intervention in a burgeoning socio-legal scholarship on dignity in this article. Drawing inductively from in-depth interviews, we find that a powerful current of dignity consciousness and sentiment, joined by an acute awareness of dignity harms, flows through the community of Chinese activist lawyers. Their dignity discourses can be witnessed and explained in four streams of awareness: (1) dignity experienced as an ideal in juridical, philosophical, and theological idioms; (2) dignity takings experienced indirectly and directly in the property takings of clients’ homes, farms, and livelihood; (3) assaults on dignity through property takings of spaces of religious worship; and (4) the takings of professional dignity from the lawyers charged with defending the dignity of others. This article points to the value of dignity framings in the general theory of collective action for basic legal freedoms.

Legal transplants are broadly recognized as one of the main mechanisms by which donor states influence the legal development of recipient states. The experience of China, however, challenges convention. While, in recent years, China has been one of the largest capital-exporting countries in the world and has mobilized law to protect its investment in high-risk recipient states, legal transplants have, to date, not played a major role in China’s approach to law and development. This article examines this puzzle through the case of China’s participation in formulating Vietnam’s 2018 SEZ Bill. In doing so, this article sets forth a number of hypotheses as to why Chinese law has thus far not assumed the form of legal transplant. The example of the SEZ Bill demonstrates how Chinese legal transplants depend as much on the “pull” of recipient states as they do on the “push” of the donor. The case-study of the SEZ Bill raises important questions not only for Chinese law and development, but also, more generally, for the viability of “second-order” legal transplants: those from an Asian donor to an Asian recipient.

Legal scholars tend to understand dignity as an intrinsic value that each individual gains at birth. This article aims to rethink dignity from a relational perspective. As dignity is highly dependent on other people’s judgement and evaluations in China, I use “relational dignity” to stress the precarious and relational nature of dignity in societies in which people attach great importance to guanxi networks. I discuss how relational dignity and state law interact to shape leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing. The precarious and relational nature of dignity motivates leftover women to follow dominant social norms in order to fit in. As a result, it reinforces state law’s discrimination against unmarried women and single mothers. On the other hand, the rubber-stamp quality of state law enables leftover women to use legal recognition to win societal recognition and attain relational dignity.

This paper focuses on the conflict of norms in the interface between the “transplanted” formal law and the local social norms in the land-law reforms in Vietnam and Myanmar, each representing different legal families, while sharing commonness in that both have attempted law-making in the post-colonial independence period in order to restore the basis of the livelihoods of the local population. Both of the legal concepts of “land-use right” (quyen su dung dat) in Vietnam and “land-use right for cultivation” (loat paing kwint) in Myanmar have been the product of law-makers’ restorative attempts at farmland security, while intentionally avoiding usage of the term “ownership” that would result in the capitalist transaction of land as a commodity. However, the contemporary land-law reforms led by donor-oriented “legal transplant” in these countries have resulted in the plunder of such policy, by reintroducing the same mechanisms of land exploitation as existed in the colonial days. Roaring protests of the local agricultural population seem to be a rising-up of the social norm descended from the immemorial past as an unwritten Constitution to bring an end to the centuries-long movement of “legal transplant” of the modern capitalist law.

Contemporary laws have been responding to the challenges of ageing societies. Elder people have gradually become a special, if not disadvantaged, social group to be protected, cared for, and even censored by law in the name of protection. The UN has long discussed a Convention to protect the distinctive human rights of old persons while invoking the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to protect the dignity of senior citizens. Under national laws, adult-guardianship, welfare, and medical laws are strengthened in the name of better elder care, yet forcing old people to give up the freedom and autonomy that they have enjoyed throughout adulthood. This paper thus argues for the socio-legal construction of “elderhood” to respond to the special needs of senior citizens to maintain individual dignity. By observing narrative accounts of elders in care, socio-legal images of Taiwan elderhood may be presented for analyses. A proposal is then made to suggest the socio-legal construction of the individual dignity of elder people.