Acknowledgments

This volume was the result of collaboration by scholars, universities, and grant-making agencies from throughout the world, and the editors want to acknowledge that without their support, this book would not have been possible. Inter-Asian Law is the product of collective insights from scholars across a dozen jurisdictions who have explored, under a shared analytical framework, the origins, drivers, processes, mechanisms, and effects of Inter-Asian Law (IAL). Organized along four thematic dimensions – commercial law, constitutional law, law’s movements, and emerging problems – this volume offers empirical, doctrinal, and theoretical contributions, and positions IAL as an emerging field and a new methodological approach within comparative and international law.

The broader institutional support for this book comes from the University of Oxford and National Tsing Hua University (NTHU). With funding from the National Science and Technology Council as well as the Ministry of Education of Taiwan, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and the European Research Council (ERC, grant agreement No. 803763), both editors organized the Inter-Asian Law Workshop at NTHU in Hsinchu, Taiwan, in 2022, where most authors met in person and engaged in deep, reflective, and thought-provoking discussions. The editors and contributors are grateful to the chairs, discussants, and participants on various panels for their inputs, which fueled the momentum for our collective endeavor. In particular, we wish to thank Mindy Chen-Wishart and Teemu Ruskola for their keynote addresses, and Yu-Jie Chen and Joshua Karton for their insights as discussants. We would also like to acknowledge a number of promising graduate students at NTHU – I-Ching Chen, Hui-Hsuan Yang, Ting-Yu Huang, Yen-Yu Hung, Ta-Jung Chang, Shih-Hao Tsai, Kuan-Lin Ho, and Yun-Sheng Lin – for their assistance in organizing the workshop. The programmatic theme of the workshop animated our discussions and laid the groundwork for the framing of this volume. Our insights were further developed and refined through scholarly debates and discussions and are now the joint product of nineteen authors. The project was further refined through a presentation at the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) annual meeting in 2024, during which several contributors presented their chapters-in-progress, and we thank Margaret Woo for her moderation and comments.

We would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of the book proposal for all their critical comments, and to Mortimer Sellers, General Editor, of the ASCL Studies in Comparative Law series, for his guidance. We thank Vicky Hayman for her careful editing of the final manuscript and two years of coordination efforts. Thanks also go to Michelle Ratton Sanchez Badin, Fabio Morosini, Olabisi Akinkugbe, Kevin Davis, and Mariana Pergendler for sharing their regional insights, and to the entire editorial team of ASCL Studies in Comparative Law at Cambridge University Press – Marianne Nield, Biju Singh, and Natasha Burton. Again, this collaborative project received generous financial and technical support, and we are particularly thankful to the ERC for enabling this volume to be made freely available online under a Creative Commons Open Access license.

The book was finalized while countries around the world are facing challenges of geopolitical tensions, trends of deglobalization and regionalization, and other lines of social, political, and economic realignment. While we noted in the conclusion that this volume is only a beginning, its focus on the contemporary landscape of IAL is already influencing domestic and transnational legal orders and will likely extend beyond the Asian region. It is our hope that this volume will stimulate future scholarly discourse on the relevance and implications of IAL as an emerging field and a new methodological approach, shedding light on other regional studies, as well as on comparative and international law.