How should scholars and policymakers think about legal pluralism? In this Conclusion, I reflect on that topic, insisting that analysts should move beyond the question of whether laws, themselves, are or are not compatible. Instead, they should look at the practices of legal pluralism that make such compatibility seem natural or permissible, exceptional or impossible. I argue that inter-legal harmony is not a technical feat, but a social, political, and emotional achievement – one that is often precarious. Legal pluralism, therefore, implicates more than just the ‘stuff’ of law, but involves the shifting and recursive processes that help us to assemble normative worlds, reckon with diverse obligations, and find meaningful pathways forward through a changing and complex life.

This chapter engages with the scholarship of legal academics Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur. In conversation with the academics, I read two of their texts: ‘An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India’ (OL) co-authored by Baxi and his colleagues Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lotika Sarkar; and Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (SS) co-authored by Kapur and her friend and colleague Brenda Cossman. I look at how, while addressing questions of gender, class and caste, the formation of the OL inhabited conversations between Baxi, his colleagues, a judge, and a tribal girl named Mathura, drawing on whose experiences the letter was written, in late-1970s post-Emergency India. I draw out from these conversations how Baxi shaped his role and responsibility in public life as a feminist law teacher and how, in doing so, he shaped mutual ties with his academic discipline of law. I locate my reading of Subversive Sites in the context of the legal academia from where Kapur and her co-author, Brenda Cossman, conceived the ideas and practices that informed the writing of their book. SS inhabited Kapur’s conversations in the early 1990s after the economic liberalisation of India, with her friend and colleague Cossman and the Indian women’s movement. Through these conversations, Kapur shaped her role and responsibility in public life as a post-colonial feminist legal scholar, and in doing so, formed mutual relations with her academic discipline of law.

This chapter presents a case study of Canada, examining the intricate relationship between Indigenous peoples and the developments related to British, then Canadian, governance. It begins by exploring the historical and legal context within which Indigenous peoples exist in Canada, tracing the impact of colonization and the recognition of Indigenous rights. The chapter then investigates the potential for affirming these rights through treaties and trade agreements, highlighting the role of treaties in recognizing and protecting Indigenous rights and the opportunities and challenges presented by trade agreements for Indigenous economic development and self-determination. It further analyses the Canadian government’s efforts to domestically enforce the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the intersection of Canadian treaties with trade agreements. This chapter emphasizes the importance of ongoing dialogue, collaboration, and the implementation of measures aligned with UNDRIP principles to foster the recognition, empowerment, and well-being of Indigenous peoples within the Canadian context.

The book concludes by bringing the different themes of this work together, considering the potential futures for the EU as the Geopolitical Union, reflecting upon how regulatory mercantilism could be a useful framework for analysis of policies beyond technology, and beyond the EU, and potential future avenues for research based on these reflections.

Chapter 8 summarises and concludes the analysis presented in the previous chapters. As highlighted throughout the book, the power of the courts to effectively protect freedom of expression is limited in the face of global digital networks and powerful private technology companies. This makes it all the more important to recognise not only the individual but also the institutional dimension of fundamental rights as objective value judgements under constitutional law, the implementation of which falls under the state’s duty to protect. Given the enormous technical and social complexity of the digital revolution, this task can only be accomplished through legislation.

How did colonialism affect the content and practice of Buddhist monastic law? This chapter answers this question from the perspective of colonial legal sources, considering the ‘practices of legal pluralism’ employed by British officials starting in the early 1800s. Drawing on colonial correspondence, court decisions, draft laws, government transcripts, and newspaper reports, I explain how and why the British concretised legal concepts, such as ‘ecclesiastical succession’, ‘Buddhist temporalities’ and ‘temple lands’, while also generating new bodies of law: a body of civil-court case law governing monks called Buddhist Ecclesiastical Law; and an influential ordinance regulating the use and administration of ‘Buddhist properties’, called the Buddhist Temporalities Ordinance. I show how colonial jurists mapped Buddhism onto particular spaces, issues and communities, such that Buddhism acquired, in law, English-style qualities of jurisdiction across three dimensions: territorial jurisdiction, subject-matter jurisdiction, and personal jurisdiction.

Chapter 10 looks at the listing of foreign companies in China, which is the other side of the coin of cross-border listings. This chapter critically examines the development and regulation of the initial public offering (IPO) and listing of foreign companies in China, and based on such examination, make suggestions for improvement. Since 2018, China has launched a pilot program to allow the listing of “Red-chip Companies,” which are established by Chinese people in offshore financial centers and are technically foreign companies. The Chinese regime for regulating foreign listings has similarities and differences with those in the US and Hong Kong, both of which have developed capital markets and are top destinations for Chinese companies to get listed overseas. This chapter argues that China should follow the Hong Kong model to grant preferential treatments only to those cross-listed in China, and also learn from the US experience with American Depositary Receipts to enhance the utility of Chinese Depository Receipts.

In conversations with sex workers and members of VAMP, this chapter engages in the reading of activist texts published by VAMP. The reading and conversations about the texts are located at VAMP’s collective organisational site in Sangli, Maharashtra. Like DMSC, VAMP also emerged through a specific set of conversations between sex workers and others. These conversations were held amongst sex workers, a non–sex worker women’s organisation called Sangram, Dalit and non-Dalit feminist groups in Maharashtra, and Dalit and non-Dalit men’s groups in Sangli. The conversations consolidated women’s collectivisation in Sangli as businesswomen, or dhandhewali, which was achieved through the formation of mutual relations between sex workers’ lives and law. Thus, the sex workers formed VAMP as a registered NGO under state-authorised rules. Through the process of registration, the women shaped their role and responsibility in public life as dhandhewali, and reorganised their specific hierarchical relations of gender, class and caste in Sangli. Simultaneously, sex workers’ relationship with the state, mediated by the reorganisation of hierarchies in their community, attained a form that was distinct from their state-authorised criminal status and conditions.

Chapter 3 investigates the reasons why many Chinese companies have decided to seek cross-border listings in the past three decades. It examines a variety of relevant theories, such as legal bonding, private benefits and market fragmentation and evaluates the extent to which they may apply to the case of Chinese companies. The overseas listing of Chinese companies offers a good case study due to the apparent disparity between China’s regulatory regime and those in the listing places. However, existing empirical research shows ambiguous or, at best, weak effects of legal bonding. This calls for a closer examination of how to interpret these empirical results and why the legal bonding effect is not as strong as expected.

Despite the Chinese government’s efforts to privatize infrastructure construction through the public-private partnership (PPP) market, the majority of investors in this sector are still state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Moreover, the government that contracts for the infrastructure construction and service usually holds a significant proportion of shares in PPP projects. This chapter explains this phenomenon using the legal theory of SOEs. It finds that, in practice, the government typically retains the power to terminate PPP projects in the public interest when new circumstances arise, while the courts offer limited protection to private investors. As a result, private investors may be deterred from investing due to concerns about government opportunism. Furthermore, it observes that a judicial reform enhancing the independence of judges is associated with an increase in the proportion of shares held by private investors and a decline in shares held by SOEs and local governments. These findings suggest that a robust legal system promotes the extent of privatization by boosting the confidence of private investors.

This chapter offers a description of the method. Elaborating on the tradition of adda, the chapter explains its significance within post-colonial thought and life in India. It then explains how adda is shaped as a method in the book by drawing on and joining insights from the works of scholars who are located within the disciplines of law and/or the humanities. The chapter provides a detailed description of how diverse scholarly works of post-colonial, feminist and jurisprudential thought are brought together and then enacted as field research for this book.