After the 2011 Arab uprisings, Egypt adopted a new constitution in 2014 that strengthened the principle of equality between men and women. In spite of its call on the State to achieve equality in all areas, family law continues to establish significant differences between wives and husbands within the couple. This contribution examines the reforms introduced in Egyptian personal status law since the beginning of the twentieth century and the differences based on gender that remain in both marriage and divorce rights and stresses how governments had to present the reforms as taking place within the shari’a in order to avoid their rejection by conservative religious circles and society.

This chapter offers an overview of the sustained reforms of Islamic family law that occurred in Tunisia from the 1950s to 2020. Organized historically, it traces developments during major time periods starting with the end of colonial rule in 1956 and ending with the aftermath of the 2010/11 Arab Spring that ushered a process of democratization in the last decade. Considering marriage, divorce and custody, we present the reforms that placed Tunisia at the vanguard of the Arab world in regard to liberalizing family law and women’s rights. We argue that sustained reforms were possible because succeeding regimes found it in their best interests to pursue a reformist policy. Since most reforms were initiated by state builders and state actors, we refer to them as “politics from above” in contrast to the “politics from below” that started in earnest with women’s activism in the later periods.

The information revolution has ushered in a data-driven reorganization of the workplace. Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) are used to surveil workers and shift risk. Workplace wellness programs appraise our health. Personality job tests calibrate our mental state. The monitoring of social media and the surveillance of the workplace measure our social behavior. With rich historical sources and contemporary examples, The Quantified Worker explores how the workforce science of today goes far beyond increasing efficiency and threatens to erase individual personhood. With exhaustive detail, Ifeoma Ajunwa shows how different forms of worker quantification are enabled, facilitated, and driven by technological advances. Timely and eye-opening, The Quantified Worker advocates for changes in the law that will mitigate the ill effects of the modern workplace.

The word ‘making’ does too much work. This chapter teases apart the etymological senses of three words that are sometimes employed interchangeably as synonyms for making. They are ‘Invention’, ‘Creation’, and ‘Production’. To list them in this order is to list them in a sequence that is broadly, but not strictly, chronological. Invention indicates the initiation of the making process, Creation describes the development stage, and Production describes the presentation or publication of the created thing. This chapter argues for a return to those original etymological distinctions as a way of distilling different significations from our undifferentiated talk of ‘making’. Perhaps it is not a return that is called for, so much as a fresh acknowledgement of etymological distinctions that still survive just below the surface of our discourse. That survival explains why, for example, one can ‘produce’ a rabbit from a hat, but one cannot ‘invent’ a rabbit, or ‘create’ a rabbit from a hat.

This book presents a new understanding of what ‘making’ means and argues for the centrality of crafting as a way of making sense of the world and the place of law, media, and politics within it. When Elaine Scarry recounted the great range of candidates that have been put forward for the category ‘artefacts’, she noted as possibilities that ‘nation states are fictions (in the sense of created things), the law is a created thing, a scientific fact (many argue) is a constructed thing’. Peter Goodrich writes similarly that ‘a significant part of the substantive law is comprised of fabulae, stories, plays, fabrications, images and fictions’. This book takes such possibilities seriously and considers how the notion of manufactured truth can inform our understanding of the tradition of making judgments in law and the trend of making judgments in society at large.

This chapter articulates the central argument (why a new legal form for social enterprises in India, Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Singapore is needed and what it should entail); explains why the four Asian jurisdictions are selected as case studies; and examines the purposes of social enterprises and their two main business models. The chapter then provides an overview of social enterprises in the four Asian jurisdictions including: their operating domains, the drivers of the development of social enterprises, the challenges faced by them, the three main conflicts of interests afflicting them, and the legal forms used by social enterprises. Importantly, the chapter shows that the legal forms available to or used by social enterprises in the four Asian jurisdictions are unable to properly address the conflicts of interests, and thus, a new legal form is required.

I always had a complicated relationship with technology. I would like it, then realize I like it too much, and then try to disentangle from it. I went through several cycles of this. As a young girl in the 1970s, I spent far too much time playing video games. Then in the 1990s, I spent every spare minute during one college semester playing a dungeon treasure hunt computer game. I stopped only after I convinced a friend to place a password on the game to prevent my access. Then came email. I simply could not stop checking it. In my first apartment in New York City as a graduate student, I endlessly connected and disconnected my modem to check my emails. But for me and for many others, 2009 was the year when things started changing. This was the year that smartphones and Facebook became popular.1 Suddenly, we could text, email, access the Internet, and engage in social interactions practically anywhere and anytime.

This introductory chapter defines and describes the field of law and society in general and the rapidly expanding body of law and society research conducted in Asia in particular. It distinguishes law and society research from three close intellectual "cousins": traditional legal scholarship, law and development studies, and critical legal studies. It then traces the various strands of Asian law and society scholarship as they developed quite differently in four Asian countries: Indonesia, Japan, China, and India. The Introduction concludes with a description of the nine chapters contained in the Reader and the five crosscutting themes that appear in each chapter.

This chapter critically engages with relevant legal consciousness literature and develops the conceptual framework of the book. It examines three accounts of law in everyday life – hegemony, alienation, and empowerment – and demonstrates their limitations in explaining the mixed, paradoxical effects of law observed through the experiences of interviewed workers and residents in Vietnam. The ethnographic approach adopted in this research foregrounds the complex nature of individuals’ life circumstances and their decision-making. The concept of precarity as applied in this book consists of three main components: Precarity as a phenomenon and result of the broader neoliberal economic structure, precarity as multifaceted and variegated individual experiences, and precarity as a ground of resistance. This chapter develops a three-pronged process that underpins the mutually reinforcing relationship between precarity and law, and identifies some of the factors that make a socialist country like Vietnam a suitable setting to explore such a relationship.

This chapter explores advance directives in Israel. Specifically, the background behind legislation of the “Dying Patient” Act is articulated, which constitutes the main legal framework for advance directives in Israel, with an emphasis on the role that a combination of religion and politics has played in shaping this law. Then, the main aspects of the law in relation to advance directives are explained, including the (narrow) definition of the “dying patient” and its implications, actions that are forbidden and allowed, with respect to not prolonging the dying patient’s life, how emphasis on advance directives may go both in the direction of prolonging or refraining from prolonging the dying patient’s life, etc. These main legal aspects are also compared to the manner in which they were addressed before the law was enacted. Finally, the chapter shows how the restrictiveness of Israeli regulations for advance directives has actually led to their under-regulation in practice from various facets. This includes practical difficulties in their implementation, the many “shades of grey” in interpreting the law by healthcare providers, as well as legal critique and precedent questioning the Dying Patient Act. Possible cultural influence(s) in the Israeli context are also stressed.

In the past decade, the Chinese government has resorted to forcibly shuttering entire industries or industrial areas to clean up the air. These “blunt force” measures are often taken as a sign of authoritarian efficiency; the state uses its coercive powers to swiftly eliminate polluting industries and then silence social dissent. This chapter introduces an alternate perspective: that blunt force regulation is a sign of ineffective bureaucratic control. When institutions are too weak to hold bureaucrats accountable, central leaders increase oversight by drastically reducing the number of steps and resources required to produce a regulatory outcome – resulting in blunt force measures. Through an overview of the causes and consequences of China’s blunt force pollution regulation, this chapter challenges the tenets of authoritarian environmentalism, forcing us to rethink what it means to be a “high-capacity” state.

This chapter introduces readers to the history of the problem of ‘cracked trials’, that are trials that do not proceed on the scheduled day, yet does not need rescheduling, as the case has already reached an outcome. The predominant reason for this is the defendant entering a late guilty plea. According to official discourse, cracked trials are attributed to tactical defendants who ‘play the system’ by delaying their guilty pleas. This chapter also introduces readers to the sentence discount as a response to encouraging defendants to plead guilty, and to plead guilty as early as possible. Under the sliding scale of sentence discounts, the early you plead guilty, the greater the sentence discount you receive. The rest of the chapter outlines the rest of the book.

This chapter introduces the multiple roles of marine protected areas using the language of the commons. After introducing how international biodiversity law uses commons' language, it attempts to discuss two main characterisations of marine protected areas: marine protected areas as regulatory tools for common-pool resources and marine protected area as institutional sites for supporting or hindering commoning practices. The discussion draws on three principal strands of social science literature: political ecology to show how rational and scientific interventions are always political, geographical literature to discuss the meaning of territory and uncover the more-than-human elements in the analysis of conservation intervention and most crucially, the literature on commons, which spans from the more traditional Ostromian analysis of common-pool resources to the more recent and politicised literature on commoning. Investigating the relationships between marine protected areas and commons is an essential preliminary step to enable a critical discussion of how English law and regulation conceptualises marine protected areas and contributes to the formation of marine protected areas as spaces of opening and/or closing.

This chapter sets the background of this study by discussing the development of the international investment agreements (IIAs) regime as a system to protect foreign investors, many of whom are transnational corporations (TNCs), the impact of TNCs’ activities on the host states, and the increasing criticism of the ’one-sidedness’ of the IIA regime, particularly the lack of a mechanism to hold investors accountable for their conduct and the call for ISDS reform to address this asymmetry. It explains that, against this background, this study examines ways to materialise investors’ responsibility within the current IIA-based dispute settlement mechanisms (investment arbitration and the Investment Court System (ICS)). This chapter also explains this study’s focus on corporate environmental responsibility and its inseparable link to human rights protection, the structure of the book, and methodology of this study.

This introdutory chapter describes events leading to the introduction of the Abortion Act. It explains the use of ’biography’ to frame the analysis, offers a brief synospsis of each chapter, discusses the sources used in the research and explains the choices made regarding terminology.

Already during the period between the two Opium Wars, China and its vast potential market had become a key site for legal and administrative innovations by Western diplomats, missionaries, and traders. The Qing conception of guoti 國體 or “state form/stateliness,” in particular, was creatively redeployed in an effort to articulate a diplomatic compromise during key meetings at Tianjin, Shanghai, and Beijing between 1858 and 1860, when a new multilateral international law regime for China was crafted by the invading Western powers.

Understanding access to justice in any jurisdiction requires identification of factors which create the dynamic in which access functions. Jurisdictions can have factors in common, but each jurisdiction has a dynamic of its own. Without an understanding of these factors and how they interact, proposed improvements in access may not accomplish much. Viewing access to justice in this way arguably allows for a clearer vision of positive change, because it acknowledges why particular changes may be difficult or unlikely. Establishing access to justice dynamics in sufficient complexity is also necessary for comparative understandings across jurisdictions, but comparative insight requires reference to an expanded set of jurisdictions, including Asia and beyond.

This Book critically examines the theory and operation of withdrawal remedies in the world’s four largest developed economies, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. This Chapter opens by introducing the legal problem at the core of the Book: the need for minority shareholder protection in situations of shareholder conflict in close corporations. After explaining out the objectives, choice of target jurisdictions, terminology, and the ‘tripartite method’ employed, this Chapter ends with an overview of the remaining Chapters in the Book.

This chapter describes the international and domestic backgrounds related to the regulations and practices of bankers’ remuneration in the UK and China. It provides an overview of the bank failures in the UK during the GFC and the practice of bankers’ remuneration incentives, which was a significant contributing factor to these bank failures. It also summarises the evolution and development of the modern banking system in China and the transitional reform of corporate governance and remuneration incentives in Chinese banks. Based on these backgrounds, this chapter highlights the rationales for the regulations of bankers’ remuneration in the UK and China respectively.

This chapter is an introduction to the book. The chapter therefore starts with introducing the practical necessity for a leniency programme and the first use of a leniency programme in the United States. After this, the focus shifts to Asia. The chapter indicates that competition law in Asia is a relatively recent phenomenon, which, in turn, has had an impact on the implementation of the leniency programme in Asia. Since the Asian countries, more specifically China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and the Philippines, saw the success of the leniency programme in other jurisdictions, their embrace of the leniency programme was not only fast but also recent. This means that these leniency programmes have not yet been researched against the existing theoretical literature.