When a government regulates an enterprise, regulatory costs arise due to bounded rationality, uncertainty, and asset specificity. To preserve flexibility, regulators are sometimes granted discretion by law to respond to new circumstances. However, such discretion can be abused to expropriate the interests of private investors, especially when private investments become specific assets that cannot be easily used for other purposes. State ownership alleviates regulatory costs by aligning the interests of the government and the enterprises, although it incurs higher ownership costs. In sectors where regulatory costs are low, private enterprises prevail because of their advantages in reducing ownership costs. Conversely, in sectors where regulatory costs are high, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are more likely to prevail and are not easy to privatize. The degree of regulatory costs depends on several factors, including the need for intense regulation in a particular sector, the degree of uncertainty, and the availability of alternative institutions that support effective regulation.

What is Buddhist monastic law? How should one think about its key texts, institutions and principles? This chapter answers these questions in the context of Sri Lanka and other parts of South and Southeast Asia, focusing especially on ideas of unity and diversity in law. The first part of this chapter summarises key ideas and principles found in the ancient code of monastic law, the Vinaya Piṭaka, which is thought to be the cornerstone of monastic legal texts and practices. The second (longer) part of this chapter introduces readers to a range of monastic legal sources outside the Vinaya Piṭaka, which also play key roles in the practice of monastic law in contemporary Sri Lanka. These sources include commentaries, constitutions, handbooks, judicial manuals, statutes, case law, social expectations and other normative sources produced by monks, state officials and Buddhist laypersons.

Chapter 1 introduces basic terminology. Terms such as artificial intelligence, data, algorithm, machine learning, neural networks, deep learning, large language models, generative AI and symbolic AI are presented to develop a sense of what AI is, how it has evolved, and what it does. This chapter also introduces some of the major conceptual disagreements in the field. Different ideas about how to develop AI in the best way drive disagreements, as well as philosophical differences over what intelligence means and whether machines can develop human-like intelligence.

Chapter 6 considers the Commission’s intent to reduce critical dependencies on third-country-based data servers and computing capabilities. It explores the Brussels effect as a motivator for further action on exporting regulatory norms concerning the protection of personal data and non-personal data, coupled with concerns over lack of competitiveness in data-derived commercial activity, particularly in the field of AI. Concerns over competitiveness impacting Europe’s security, and the risks posed by unauthorised access to industrial or sensitive data from the governments in third countries, the Commission desires increased regulatory control. This is facilitated by industrial policy aimed at both promoting European data server infrastructure and encouraging switching to those Common European Data Spaces as a means of building up a European data economy, while placing strict limitations on the export of non-personal data outside of Europe’s borders. The Commission combines this with an attempt to utilise the Brussels effect to ensure that European standards concerning the safe use of AI technologies become global standards shaped by the EU and its values.

Chapter 6 is about laws as binding mechanisms to eliminate or mitigate AI risks and harms. Most countries have AI-promotion strategies that devote little or no attention to potential problems. The number of bills proposed in national legislatures to address those problems has been increasing since the late 2010s, but only the European Union and South Korea have thus far legislated laws regulating AI. Despite the absence of AI-centric lawmaking, however, some trends are emerging. First, AI regulation has been taking place, to a limited extent, in AI-adjacent realms such as data privacy and protection, consumer rights, antitrust, and children’s protection. Second, the European Union’s AI Act has set the trend for risk-based, future-proof and technology-neutral legislation that will likely be followed by other countries. Third, the absence of national legislation in the United States, home to most cutting-edge AI technologies from the 1990s to the early 2020s, has led states and cities to launch legal initiatives. And finally, even the successful passage of a law does not address all AI risks and harms – lawmakers’ omission of military AI as an area of regulation is a case in point.

Why do similar conditions of legal pluralism lead to conflict in one setting and compromise in another? This chapter addresses this question by approaching legal pluralism not as an empirical condition – a multiplicity of legal orders that individuals navigate – but as a set of practices that bring order, structure and meaning to the obligations, codes and norms that one confronts. Drawing on three relatively recent case studies, this chapter demonstrates how the same set of normative artefacts – the same texts, norms, institutions, and authorities – can be assembled, interpreted, and mobilised in profoundly divergent and even agonistic ways. The first case study involves a monk’s attempt to gain a driving license. The second involves the issuing of identity cards for Buddhist nuns (bhikkhunīs). The third relates to a parliamentary bill designed to recognise monastic constitutions (katikāvatas) in law.

Discussion of the concept of contract under the theory of obligatio, and analysis of major contract issues, including formation of contract, validity and defenses, performance, modification and assignment, rescission and termination, breach and remedies, and the matters involving third-party.

Chapter 1 is the theoretical basis for the rest of the book, fully outlining the regulatory mercantilist framework, its origins, distinctions from other modes of regulatory governance, and its characteristics. This chapter considers the approach of regulatory capitalism and how it has been the Commission’s approach to technology regulation until relatively recently, aligned with the idea of the regulatory state and the reliance on expert-led forms of self-regulation or regulatory networks as a means of achieving economic goals based on a logic of efficiency rather than one of security. It outlines the ideas of mercantilism and its core features, expanding on how regulatory mercantilism draws from these principles, representing a changed paradigm in technology regulation in which the logic is one of security, with security and economy being mutually constitutive policy objectives, motivated by concerns over external dependency and guaranteeing sovereignty. It highlights the more interventionist approach to regulation that is adopted within a regulatory mercantilist approach, the renewed emphasis on industrial policy, and the regulatory export of standards as global standards.

This chapter provides the historical background to the study and examines Tunisian history from the end of colonialism to the transition following the fall of the Ben Ali regime. It identifies the main societal cleavages and lines of conflict, power structures and changes to them, as well as the nature of the regime that people were rising up against in 2010/11. The chapter fulfils the purpose of outlining what kind of past is dealt with in Tunisia’s transitional justice process while also demonstrating that the Tunisian revolution did not provide a clean slate for transitional justice. It shows that transitional justice is therefore neither neutral nor happening in a historical and political vacuum. In this vein, the chapter first looks at the grievances that emerged from and violations that happened during the independence period and Bourguiba’s rule. It then turns to the systems of power under Ben Ali, outlining how existing grievances were exacerbated and new ones emerged. The chapter also presents possible explanations for the collapse of the regime, as discussed in the academic literature, as well as a discussion of post-revolutionary political developments, power shifts, and frictions. It thereby also outlines the political context after the ruptures of 2011 to better understand the dynamics of transitional justice, the course it takes, the friction the transitional justice project provokes, and the challenges it faces.

Chapter 3 moves to the global level, exploring the history of technology control and its historical links to geopolitics. It begins by considering control of technology in the context of the Cold War and technology as being explicitly considered a security issue in terms of the conflict between the US and the Soviet Union. It covers the CoCom technology restrictions imposed by the US, and Soviet Union attempts to gain access to critical technologies through Comecon, before considering how the approach to technology changed substantially with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the belief in the triumph of the liberal international order and globalism as reflected by the World Trade Organization and ‘free trade’. It then explores the multifaceted crises impacting upon this conviction in the benefits and resilience of the global trade system, the increased economic conflict between the US and China as a rising technological power, and a move from multilateralism in a ‘unipolar’ system to increased nationalism and protectionism in a ‘multipolar’ system, and what this meant for the EU’s sense of insecurity and vulnerability in the context of geopolitical reordering.

This chapter focuses on the shift from ad hoc measures to an institutionalised transitional justice project. A technical committee composed of representatives of civil society and the Ministry for Human Rights and Transitional Justice led a participatory consultation process and drafted a transitional justice law. Which transitional justice measures were introduced was co-determined by the international transitional justice professionals. The broad mandate that emerged from this process mirrored the dominant dogma in transitional justice research and scholarship as well as the political interests of both international and domestic actors. In this stage, the transitional justice process interplayed with unplanned, spontaneous political and social dynamics. The struggles over the constitution-writing process and at times violent protests pushed the topic back on to the political agenda. The National Dialogue then opened the way for the primacy of acute conflict-resolution and elite deal-making over further dismantling the old regime and seeking justice and accountability. The parliament’s decision to retain its prerogative of nominating truth commissioners paved the way for a perception of the Truth and Dignity Commission as a political and partisan body.

Analysis of China’s governing ideology, concept of law as defined in China, the rule of law from the Chinese perspective, and China’s pursuit of social harmony and underlying core socialist values.