Viet Nam’s pursuit of data sovereignty is reshaping its digital governance, while its implications for individual rights and digital markets require more careful consideration. The transition from the 2018 Cyber Security Law to the 2025 consolidated Cyber Security Law raises an important questions: how can data sovereignty be advanced while preserving legal certainty, rights protection, and digital economic growth? This article applies doctrinal analysis and a regulatory rule-of-law framework to analyse the clarity of new obligations, the proportionality of enforcement powers and penalties, restorative and resilience measures supporting trust and business continuity; and the balance between certainty and adaptability in a rapidly evolving digital economy. It suggests that while consolidation has improved textual coherence and enhanced the State capacity, but may also give rise to broad technology-neutral duties and significant administrative discretions. Without more contestable standards and carefully calibrated safeguards, these developments may place additional compliance burdens on businesses and affect investment confidence and rights protections in Viet Nam.

This article examines how artificial intelligence (AI) impacts state sovereignty and the balance between innovation and control in AI governance through a case study of Türkiye. As AI technologies become increasingly sophisticated, they challenge traditional notions of sovereignty, creating tensions between fostering innovation and maintaining regulatory control. The concept of “AI sovereignty” encompasses a state’s ability to exercise meaningful control over AI infrastructure, data resources, regulatory frameworks, and technological capabilities. Türkiye’s AI strategy illustrates how “middle powers” navigate this balance, especially as it stands at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, requiring Türkiye to develop distinct approaches that reflect its unique geopolitical position. The analysis reveals that sovereignty in the AI domain encompasses multiple dimensions—technical capabilities, regulatory frameworks, and strategic positioning—requiring adaptable governance approaches. The findings offer insights for jurisdictions seeking to balance innovation imperatives with control mechanisms while maintaining strategic autonomy in an evolving global AI landscape.

This study analyses the diversification of the South Korean legal field following institutional changes. South Korean reforms to legal education and legal practice between 2007 and 2011, specifically the 2007 Act on the Establishment and Management of Professional Law Schools and the 2011 Attorney-at-Law Act amendments, expanded the pool of new attorneys and increased the number of law firms. The government increased the supply of lawyers by reforming the legal education system, while concurrent regulations promoted gender diversity in the system. Restrictions on establishing law firms were loosened. Using data on founding partners who established law firms in South Korea from 2000 to 2016, this study examines the effects of these legal reforms on the gender diversity of founding law firm partners. The findings reveal that the proportion of women among founding partners increased following these reforms, suggesting that the institutional changes encouraged gender desegregation in the Korean legal field.

This article discusses the transformation of West Sumatran (Minangkabau) subjectivity-making through legal discourses in the late colonial period. Emphasis is put on the role of Minangkabau elites who adopted such legal discourses from Dutch colonial ethnographers, allowing them to position themselves as mediators between their Sumatran peers and the colonial government and to negotiate themselves towards political power. I argue that legal subjectivities played a dual role in these endeavours; they were developed to re-fashion Minangkabau elites as experts in colonial modernity and to project these new senses of self outwards to a wider public. A flurry of publications, from newspapers to monographs on custom and court manuals, facilitated the proliferation of legal discourses and engaged in multiple types of identity formation underpinned by law. This article investigates the different types of legal subjectivities espoused in these publications and their circumscription of everyday life within the rigidifying parameters of law.

This article examines how courts in a diverse and divided society navigate tensions over a polarized religious issue. The incrementalist approach that defers difficult choices about state and religion through vague compromise has been defended in polities where achieving cohesion proves difficult. This article investigates how the court grapples with incrementalist logic underlying the regulation of interfaith marriage in Indonesia. To mitigate disagreements, the Indonesian Marriage Law has left the legality of interfaith marriage ambiguous and subject to constant negotiation and compromise. This article argues that the Indonesian Constitutional Court has failed to sustain this balance, as the court increasingly leans towards the religious aspect of marriage. Indonesian experience shows the complexities of court interventions on unclear legislative agreements and contentious issues in society. The Court adopted a rigid legal interpretation based on conservative religious views, which not only undermines rights and pluralism, but intensifies tensions and complicates future negotiations.

This article examines how judicial legitimacy in adversarial systems is fundamentally shaped by institutional constraints by arguing that courts inherit legitimacy deficits from investigative, prosecutorial, and post-judicial actors. Rather than viewing legitimacy as court-generated, I introduce the concept of “legitimacy transfer” to explain how deficits at one institutional stage structurally constrain courts’ capacity to generate public trust through their own actions alone. Using Malaysia’s corruption cases as a critical case study, it demonstrates how judicial legitimacy is fundamentally shaped by entire legal process from initial investigations through prosecutorial decisions to post-judicial mechanisms. The analysis reveals how investigative thoroughness, prosecutorial independence, and post-judicial mechanisms like royal pardons or executive clemency might significantly impact public trust in judicial outcomes. This reconceptualization suggests that in adversarial systems, strengthening judicial legitimacy requires a holistic approach addressing the entire legal process rather than focusing only on the court.

The essence of the Metaverse lies in the inter-subjectivity revealed by phenomenology. The many-worlds model reveals the significance of interaction and communication for digital human existence. The Metaverse exhibits a rhizomatic structure of narrative from multiple small universe interpretations, particularly the cross-embedding and close coupling between digital relational orders and analog legal orders formed through interface revolution. Virtuality-reality interfacing permits rational design based on exchange concepts, yielding twelve fundamental digital-age juridical propositions from subject interaction ordering mechanisms. These propositions indicate that with consumer sovereignty and distributed autonomous organizations, the Metaverse will transform order principles. A corridor system connecting cyberspace to off-chain society will be built using code and smart contracts as dual interfaces, producing varied relationship-law combinations.

Observing the high compliance rates of tech giants with judicial suggestions from Internet courts in China, this article supplements Galanter’s thesis by reconsidering the extent to which repeat players inherently dominate litigation outcomes over one-shotters. Drawing from theories of relational contracts and governance, it proposes a theory of relational adjudication that not only explains the compliance phenomenon but also offers new insights into the high success rates of repeat players. This theory suggests that courts, acting as “repeat referees,” leverage long-term interactions to encourage greater compliance and improve litigation outcomes among these players. Central to this cooperative dynamic are reciprocal expectations and frequent information exchanges. Contrary to traditional views, within a relational governance framework, court intervention extends beyond case-by-case decisions to include systematic compliance advice, thereby integrating legal risk prevention into daily corporate practices. However, potential drawbacks such as risks to judicial credibility and integrity warrant careful consideration.

How do academics interested in the study of legal topics that implicate the state relate to and deal with pressures that shape the space available to conduct research? This article examines the nature and impact of such pressures on Asia-focused public law scholars who must contend with a more diverse socio-political environment than the liberal democratic setting in which questions of academic freedom are typically explored. We find that the Asia-centric academy is affected by a wide range of constraints that notably extends beyond intra-institutional demands to those put in place by the state. This article also highlights how the scholarly agenda as set in and by the Global North may reduce the room for Asia-centric research to engage in theory-building and concept formation and explores how Asia-centric scholars can assert agency in the face of pressures. We conclude by emphasising the need for greater self-reflectivity within the legal academy.