Discussion and analysis of tort law under the Civil Code, including such issues as the concept and determination of torts, tort liability imputation, tort liability allocation, defenses to tort liability, damages and compensation.

The Conclusion reviews the argument that English masters and brokers wielded consent as a tool of labor coercion in the early modern period. Presumptions, shaped by people’s age, gender, and social status, determined if consent had been given or not. While the subjects of this book largely aimed to stabilize their social worlds, their use of consent in labor relationships often had the opposite effect. In the discourse of enticement, individuals bore the burden of choosing correctly in a labor market where structural inequalities exposed some people to jobs that most would never accept. The conclusion further considers methods and sources for the history of consent. The connected study of charity, colonization, and war has allowed the identification of trends in contract labor coercion that might otherwise be seen as aberrations. The book ends by considering how captured consent was meaningful in the past and continues to have a significant legacy.

Chapter 7 examines audit oversight issues concerning overseas-listed Chinese companies, paying particular attention to the disputes between China and the US. It also discusses how Hong Kong has managed to solve its audit dispute with Mainland China and how it has played an important role in solving the China–US dispute. In practice, the auditing of overseas-listed companies is usually undertaken by local accounting firms, raising the issue of whether the regulators of the host market can reach the local accounting firms and relevant documents in their possession, particularly audit working papers. Until recently, this legal conflict has long been a serious dispute between the Chinese securities regulators and their counterparts in the US and Hong Kong. Only after the US Congress intervened to pass the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act in 2020 could the US regulators finally reached an agreement with the Chinese regulators in 2022. This is a good start, but given the China–US geopolitical tensions, it remains to be seen whether the China–US 2022 Agreement will be implemented effectively as expected in the future.

Hostility towards parties has never ceased; revisiting Hans Kelsen’s ideas is particularly significant today when critiques of parties are meeting the revival of the myth of People as One, which Kelsen devoted much of his work as a legal scholar and political theorist to opposing. Kelsen addressed the issue of parties at two significant historical moments when the constitutional government was succumbing to the assault of autocracy (Fascism and Nazism) and revolutionary experimentations (Bolshevism) and when parties regained momentum with the Cold War. These were two very different circumstances: in the former, the issue was opposing and resisting monocratic dictatorship; in the latter, the issue was defending party pluralism within liberal democracy itself. Kelsen never resorted to ‘militant democracy’ to protect democracy. The reason was both theoretical and empirical. As a ‘formalist’, Kelsen kept substantive politics out of procedural politics, which he considered normative or ‘not metaphysical’ because its task was channelling public doing and not achieving certain specific goals; the sole purpose of the rules of the game was the exercise and reproduction over time of political freedom. Therefore, pluralism, legal equality, and individual liberties were non-negotiable norms of democracy, whose process was based on the spirit of compromise and majority rule.

Contemporary constitutional theorists typically assume that a system of constitutional adjudication inevitably stands in tension with a majoritarian understanding of democracy. Kelsen’s influential defence of constitutional review, by contrast, goes along with an affirmation of a procedural and majoritarian understanding of democracy. Did Kelsen fail to spot the supposed conflict between constitutional review and democracy? Or did he identify a solution to the counter-majoritarian difficulty? Michel Troper has vigorously argued that Kelsen’s defence of constitutional review is confused and fails to cohere with his conception of democracy. This chapter defends Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review against Troper’s charges. It argues both that Kelsen’s case for constitutional review is fundamentally sound and that it carries the potential to make an important contribution to contemporary debates on the legitimacy of judicial control of constitutionality. Kelsen’s argument for constitutional review offers a compelling case for constitutional review that focuses on the conditions of the proper functioning of electoral democracy rather than on the protection of liberal rights.

Multi-party, representative democracy is, according to Kelsen, an intrinsically fragile achievment – one that never can nor should be taken for granted. The fragility of multi-party democracies, based on party pluralism and free, competitive elections is the topic he explores in a lesser-know work published in the mid 1930s: La Dictature du Parti (1935). It focuses upon the underlying weaknesses of European interwar democracies which make possible their transformation into party dictatorships. The chapter explores Kelsen’s broader theoretical framework and contribution through a comparative analysis with those in the contemporaneous, early work of Franz Neumann, The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal System in Modern Society (1936), which, through a critique of Kelsen’s legal positivism, developed a distinctive, sociological approach to the relationship between law and state. The comparison of the two works reveals the significant engagement of Continental political theory and jurisprudence, throughout the 1930s, with the question of the underlying fragility of European interwar democracies. It, thereby, adds depth and breadth to the study of the genesis of Kelsen’s theory of democracy allowing one to capture more vividly the argument at the core of his La Dictature du Parti: the transformation of democracy into autocracy rests not on the dissolution of the rule of law and the rise of a state without law (as for Neumann), but on the transformation of the very content of the legal system.

Chapter 4 looks at the issue of extraterritorial jurisdiction of Chinese securities law over Chinese companies listed overseas. In 2019, Chinese securities law was revised significantly to introduce an explicit provision on extraterritorial jurisdiction, but it is not clear how the provision may be applied in practice. In 2020, Luckin Coffee, a China-based US-listed company, was found to have committed serious accounting fraud, which generated an intense discussion on the application of extraterritorial jurisdiction. In this regard, China may consider national interests, the principle of international comity, and the issue of judicial recourse constraints.

This chapter closes off the volume by exploring the innovative approaches to incorporating the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and sustainable development in newly negotiated Indigenous trade agreements. The introduction highlights the significance of UNDRIP in promoting the rights and aspirations of Indigenous peoples. The chapter details the origins of the Indigenous Peoples Economic Trade and Cultural Agreement (IPETCA), focusing on its innovations that enabled trade negotiations that amplified Indigenous views and values while enabled by the nation-states of New Zealand, Taiwan, Australia, and Canada. The chapter then delves into the sustainable development aspects of IPETCA, showcasing how it aligns with the principles of UNDRIP and fosters economic growth while respecting Indigenous rights. It then discusses IPETCA’s working mechanism and implementation. Thus, the chapter underscores the importance of innovative approaches like IPETCA in advancing Indigenous trade agreements that prioritize sustainable development and uphold the principles of UNDRIP.