Chapter 1 examines the imperial silencing regime in Hong Kong from the early colonial years to the turn of the nineteenth century, a regime I call ‘punitive censorship’. The chapter details how for the first fifty years of British rule in Hong Kong following its inception in 1841, criminal prosecutions under libel law were wielded by the colonial government as the major tool against newspaper editors who criticised government officials and/or policies. Libel prosecutions aimed not only to suppress criticism of the colonial government but also to manage Britain’s geopolitical interests in East Asia, particularly its relationship with China. In addition to suppressing the Hong Kong press through judicial proceedings, the colony’s censorship regime also featured legislative measures that, for example, forbade the import of anti-colonial materials into Hong Kong

This chapter provides an overview of the General Assembly’s decision-making powers and related functions. The UN Charter describes resolutions of the General Assembly as recommendations. However, the letter of the UN Charter does not exclude the possibility that resolutions may acquire legal significance, which is a matter of empirical assessment. The chapter then analyses seven decades of General Assembly practice. Based on an original dataset, it sheds light on the working methods and practices informing the functioning of the General Assembly in plenary session as well as its six main committees. For each of them, it provides information about the number of resolutions adopted, their subject matter and voting patterns. The empirical analysis is useful to shed light on the degree of autonomy of the General Assembly from its member states through the analysis of the body of practice developed by both the plenary session and its six main committees. Building on the empirical findings, the chapter elaborates on the concept of autonomy of the General Assembly and its connection with the process through which resolutions acquire legal significance. It concludes by pointing out that it is not possible to generalize about the functioning of the General Assembly and, consequently, the legal significance of resolutions.

This chapter deepens the insight that tort law fulfils a societal role. It locates the classical model of tort liability, namely individual responsibility, within a wider privatist societal constitution. Both contract and tort, however, are understood as second order observations of the knowledge base of society, which has broken free of tradition and centralized authority in modernity. Therefore, private law models its dynamic knowledge base, and provide a constitution of civil society that unleashes experimentation and enables a 'relational rationality' to unfold. The gradual emergence classical tort law is documented, and its constitutional role underscored through examples from of private and public liability in English, French and German law. The society of individuals on which the law of torts is modelled, however, begins to rupture by the end of the 19th century, and it becomes increasingly difficult to frame all legal problems as issues of corrective justice. Nonetheless, the legacy of classical tort law, is a model of individual responsibility, which continues to shape scholarly engagement with tort law, and continues to impact on how legal problems are perceived in law.

This chapter discusses the background, thesis, significance and implications of researching the theme of the sources of Chinese law in both comparative and Chinese legal scholarship. It also identifies the significant components of positive law in China’s legislative system and provides a general overview of China’s legislative system, along with the theoretical claims and interdisciplinary analysis involved in the detailed discussion presented in the following chapters.

This fragment’s argument rejects positivism, the leading theoretical framework informing comparative law, and introduces culturalism with a view to enhancing comparatism’s interpretive yield.

Despite the consolidation of Communist power and the encouragement of President Xi Jinping’s cult of personality, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also surprisingly moved to expand judicial autonomy during Xi’s term in office. This chapter discusses that the years leading up to sweeping reforms to enhance the autonomy of China’s judges, local promotion systems for mid-ranking judges in some case study localities featured enhanced transparency, competition, and the routinization of judicial promotion procedures that departed from previous systems of direct nomination and appointment by local Party leaders. Based on nearly two years of in-country fieldwork, I present the broad contours that the expansion of the legal profession pressured judicial leadership to enact these and similar changes, a theory and approach that both challenges and contributes to the extant literature on comparative court politics and Chinese judicial politics.

Chapter 1 immerses the reader into the Za'atari refugee camp. Situated in Jordan just seven and a half miles south of the Syrian border, the camp – a two-square-mile rectangle divided into twelve districts – is nestled in the very heart of the Middle East. Here, in the desert heat, a community was born in the swell of crisis. The reader is immediately introduced to the book's three featured Syrian women entrepreneurs – Yasmina, Asma, and Malak – in their elements. Yasmina, a salon and wedding dress shop owner, is relaxing in the salon with her family as her client celebrates a beautiful wedding a couple of districts away. Asma, a social entrepreneur and teacher, is reading a story to a group of children – including three of her own – in her trailer, which she has converted into a magical hideout for the children. Malak, an artist, is putting the finishing touches on a series of drawings for an event at a youth center that is meant to encourage the girls in Za'atari to push against the harmful practice of child marriage.

We are delighted and proud to present this wonderful collection of essays marking Lady Hale’s retirement from the UK Supreme Court in 2020. Adding to the tributes paid to her by Lord Reed, Richard Atkins QC, Christina Blacklaws and Dinah Rose QC at the moving valedictory ceremony held at the Supreme Court in December 2019, these chapters, comprising a mix of academic appraisals and personal reflections, take stock of Hale’s remarkable career to date. No one would be so foolish as to imagine that her career has now come to an end. There will no doubt be further chapters to write as her formal judicial retirement in the UK is followed by numerous new projects, both local and international. In particular, as someone who has analysed the law as an academic, helped to develop legislation as a Law Commissioner, and interpreted and applied legislation and developed the common law as a judge, it is fitting that she should now contribute to the making of legislation as a member of the (parliamentary as opposed to judicial) House of Lords. But there is no doubt that her contributions as an academic, Law Commissioner and judge have been extraordinary, and it is those contributions that this volume records and celebrates.

Chapter 1 analyses how current research on AI has begun investigating the feasibility of producing autonomous weapon systems (AWS) and the challenges that they represent for current IHL . The fact that they collect and process their own data and make lethal targeting selection without human intervention constitutes the ‘third revolution in military affairs’. AWS will deliver enormous advantages such as the ‘dissociation of risk’ for soldiers, and the ‘dissociation of communication’ between human operators and weapons systems. The element of ‘dissociation of communication’ has been made possible due to the progress in the area of machine learning. Thus, Chapter 1 analyses how machine learning algorithms operate. Indeed, the algorithm designed and programmed for a mission can have a tripartite structure: an algorithm for situation assessment; a selection algorithm; and an algorithm for situation management. In spite of the advantages that AWS may introduce on the battlefield, machine learning algorithms are not deterministic but predictable algorithms and operate as black-box systems. Consequently, AWS cannot be said to be reliable but rather remain unpredictable. Their unpredictable nature will introduce challenges not only in terms of legal reviews and levels of reliability, but also especially in terms of accountability for violations of IHL caused by AWS.

Within less than twenty years the idea of shareholder stewardship has become a global phenomenon. In 2010, the United Kingdom released the world’s first stewardship code to cure what was perceived to be the UK’s primary corporate governance malady: rationally passive institutional investors in a country characterised by a dispersed ownership structure. Today, UK-style stewardship codes exist in 20 jurisdictions, on 6 continents, and are embedded in a panoply of legal systems, shareholder markets, and corporate cultures. This introductory Chapter to the Global Shareholder Stewardship edited book explains why shareholder stewardship around the world is far more complex than the existing literature suggests and how this complexity impacts current theories and existing practices. To explain complexity, the Chapter provides a loose taxonomy of global shareholder stewardship and examines stewardship from multiple perspectives. This complexity, which has largely been overlooked in the literature, creates distinct varieties of stewardship. Based on the distinct varieties of stewardship in jurisdictions around the world, this Chapter concludes by illuminating the challenges and possibilities of global shareholder stewardship. The taxonomy also serves as a useful lens for observing the common themes and points of intersection that make the whole of this Book greater than the sum of its individual Chapters.

Chapter 1 illuminates the concealed politics behind the growing reliance on law and courts to shape public policy and resolve political struggles. Focusing on what is often depicted as a cradle of judicial activism and the "judicialization of politics" – the European Union (EU) – the chapter develops a revisionist theory of lawyers, courts, and political development that animates this book. Beneath the radar, the EU's political development through law is an exemplary story of how lawyers mobilize courts to catalyze institutional change – alongside the limits, mutations, and consequences accompanying these efforts. It is a story that places in stark relief how political orders forged through networks of courts emerge, why judges would resist these institutional changes when they would augment their own power, and the conditions whereby lawyers can overcome bureaucratic and political resistances to judicialization. The chapter introduces the concept of ghostwriting to describe lawyers who act as agents of change while cloaked behind the sheepskin of rights-conscious litigants and activist judges. It then outlines a research design to exhume how the politics of lawyers shaped the tortuous development of the world’s sole supranational polity, concluding with a roadmap for the rest of the book.

Reducing air pollution, a leading cause of death, has become a critical goal worldwide. However, the degree of success has varied greatly, even in the same locality over time. Theories and empirical studies so far mainly explain the static existence of pollution. The major social science explanations for the existence of pollution are: (1) sacrificing environmental quality at the altar of the economy; (2) pursuing short-sighted environmental planning; and (3) exploiting information asymmetry to weaken environmental monitoring and enforcement. However, they do not explain the systematic temporal variation in environmental policy implementation. This book fills this critical gap and takes a different view than the existing works regarding several factors that explain reported changes in air quality, namely the manipulation of air quality data by subnational officials and the effect of ad hoc, top-down implementation campaigns on actual air quality. The rest of the chapter provides an overview of the mixed methods used, intended audiences, and a roadmap for the book.

Chapter 1 tells the story of a forgotten reform, which was also among the most momentous policy initiatives in the history of Chinese taxation. The Chinese government began to build a tax administration workforce in the 1980s, during which time tax collectors practiced “nanny-style” administration: tax collectors handled most taxpayers’ compliance tasks. A major reform in 1994 introduced novel taxes, which required the wide adoption of taxpayer self-assessment. Reforming tax administration was thus necessary; tax administration reform began in earnest in 1997 and mobilized massive public and private resources. But it was interrupted by government restructuring and came to be challenged within tax agencies. By 2005, a regime largely modeled on the pre-1993 system was instituted, which gave priority to tax administrator initiatives over taxpayers’ in compliance. The 1997 reform was effectively abandoned. This unexpected survival of the pre-1994 tax administration approach defines the uniqueness of China’s modern fiscal state. The chapter considers two other institutions often taken as central to Chinese taxation – the separation of tax administration into two branches, and investments in information technology – and argues that their significance is ambiguous. Instead, a third feature of Chinese tax administration – extensive decentralization – represents a more important background.

This book is an updated and lengthened version of the lectures that I gave in the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law in October 2016 as part of the Lauterpacht lecture series, which was founded in 1983 to celebrate the unique contribution to the development of public international law made by Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. In keeping with the lecture series, I sought connections between my work as a feminist international lawyer and that of Sir Hersch Lauterpacht in his long career as an academic and scholar, a barrister and judge at the International Court of Justice and, as recounted by Sir Robert Jennings, a ‘remarkable’ teacher.1 In the simplest, logistic terms, he was a lecturer at the London School of Economics prior to taking up his chair at Cambridge and he also lectured at the University of Michigan,2 both places where I hold academic appointments.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the book’s main themes and arguments. IP accidents should be governed by a negligence liability rule for reasons of efficiency, equity, and fairness.

This chapter argues for the need to revise the features seen as distinctive by British scholars who have studied French administrative law in the past. There is a distinctive path dependence arising particularly from the Napoleonic reforms and from the separation of public and private law courts. But modern French administrative law is shaped by the rise of French constitutional law, EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights. The influence of these is illustrated. Contemporary trends in French public administration are also discussed.

This chapter begins by introducing the problem of access to affordable medicines in developing countries. It describes the patent policy space available to states prior to the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement and the attempts made by developing countries to reclaim their patent policy space after the adoption of the TRIPS Agreement via the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health. It notes that the Doha Declaration only yielded marginal gains in the form of the confirmation of the flexibilities that are already contained in the TRIPS Agreement and the introduction of a waiver system that is more burdensome and less beneficial. Nevertheless, the chapter contends that paragraph 4 of the Doha Declaration provides a linchpin that developing countries can use to preserve their patent policy space as it sanctions the incorporation of a right to health perspective, and invariably the incorporation of a model of human rights, into the design, implementation, interpretation, and enforcement of their national patent laws. The chapter also presents a roadmap for the rest of the book.

It has been argued that during the Western Zhou, Chinese monarchs adopted a multicentric governance model (Wu 2013, pp.137–57). The successive Spring and Autumn Period was a time marked by a collapse of rites and corruption of norms (礼崩乐坏), while the Warring States Period by great chaos of competing to be the hegemon. Both periods were characterized by a disruption of sociopolitical order en masse – a disruption so unsettling that Chinese history moved again toward the concentration of power and a unipolar model of political governance. Qinshi Huangdi, the emperor of Qin, unified China, ended its disunity, and created a highly centralized structure of political power. Lord Shang, a well-known minister in the unified Qin Empire, once suggested that “[o]nly when a sage rules the country will he strive for singleness of purpose.” The means to achieve this goal is by the law, with its guideline being a draconian legal system that is founded on strict reward and punishment. This effective control serves the purpose of building a sense of authority among the people. In the eyes of a legalist in ancient China, inasmuch as the monarch monopolizes power and uses it as an instrument for state governance, this can easily achieve its effectiveness. As Guanzi argued, “[m]ajesty cannot be wielded by two persons; government cannot have two gates. When a ruler uses laws to govern his country, he need only put them in place and that is all.” This practice of subjugating the law to political power has one archetype – Li Kui’s The Canon of Law (法经).

Law is a fiction.1 Copyright law is an excellent example of legal fictions. All its norms, definitions, doctrines – e.g., creativity, originality, personality, economic and moral rights, limitations, and exceptions, to name a few – are created and regularly re-created by human minds to serve metaphorical purposes.2 At the same time, copyright law is not a limitless fiction. It has its historical roots, development, subjects, objects, purposes, and limits. The ultimate question of copyright law, then, is nothing else than why, to whom, and to what extent do laws assign copyright protection?3