China’s rapid economic development in the absence of strong protections for property rights challenges conventional economic and legal theories. The regime’s ability to maintain not only political control but a significant level of popular support is another Chinese puzzle. Susan Whiting, a longtime scholar of rural China’s political economy, will share insights from her latest book, Illiberal Law and Development: Property Rights and Conflict Over Land in China. Whiting argues that the Chinese state uses law to reassign land rights in order to facilitate development of new sectors and that this analysis sheds new light on the development paths of other cases, including eighteenth-century England and contemporary India. All three states intervened to reassign property rights and spur economic development, but the states differ more significantly in their use of law to manage the resulting conflict.
Professor Whiting will join us live via Zoom and will answer questions from both the online audience and those in the room.
In recent years, amid intensifying geopolitical tensions and conflicts, the effectiveness of international law and particularly the UN Charter’s obligation that all states settle their disputes peacefully is widely contested. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), by contrast, has attracted more litigants than ever before as well as high profile requests for advisory opinions that have drawn the participation of unprecedented numbers of states seeking to participate in the judicial process. While the world’s attention focuses on the election of a new UN Secretary-General, the same political organs responsible for that selection – the UN General Assembly and Security Council – are engaged in electing or re-electing a number of judges to a Court that is now seen as the favored international venue for ‘strategic litigation.’ One of those candidates, Paik Jin-Hyun, a former president of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and an experienced arbitrator for international disputes, will share his views on why the judicial interpretation of international law remains popular when that law is itself under severe challenge.
What determines a corporation’s nationality, and who decides? Corporate national identity used to be determined by relatively fixed and tangible factors such as where a corporation was incorporated, where its headquarters were located, or the nationality of its controlling shareholder. But as corporate identity increasingly intersects with national security concerns and geopolitical rivalries, it has become a subject of contestation and reassignment by unilateral government action, especially during cross-border mergers and acquisitions. Curtis Milhaupt, an expert on comparative corporate governance, will explore the ways in which corporations today are trying to control perceptions of their identity, while governments are intervening to reduce the perceived influence of rival states.
Professor Milhaupt will join us live via Zoom and will answer questions from both the online audience and those in the room.
What happens when local governments that cannot make treaties enter into written commitments with foreign governments? To find out, Yuhei Matsuyama laboriously created a database of agreements entered into over a forty-year period between Japanese prefectures and foreign governments. He discovered a network of practical and constructive agreements, many with Japan’s neighbors, that serve the interests of local communities and also generally support national foreign policy.
China’s new Regulation on Countering Unjustified Extraterritorial Jurisdiction by Foreign States introduces a potentially significant conceptual shift in the global debate over jurisdictional conflicts. Rather than asking only whether a foreign state’s exercise of jurisdiction is lawful under international law, the Regulation creates a further requirement: that such jurisdiction be “justified.” Zheng (Sophia) Tang writes that the “justification” standard has the potential to influence the development of customary international law.
The deep partisan divisions rending Taiwan's government are no secret. Legislative push-back to President Lai Ching-te’s budgets has received international attention. Yinn-Ching Lu writes that much less attention has been paid both abroad and within Taiwan to a different manifestation of the power struggle between the branches: near-paralysis of the government appointment process. Critical institutions’ leadership ranks are being decapitated by the legislature’s refusal to approve presidential nominees, a phenomenon that Lu says may ultimately be more damaging to Taiwan’s democracy.
October 11 – October 17
China’s government announces plans to restrict or ban exports of forty technologies involving AI, chip design, and solar power; Hong Kong opens a mainland China border checkpoint at which travelers clear both sides’ exit/entry procedures in a single queue; a Japanese court rejects the first of six lawsuits that seek to hold Meta liable for failing to take down fake celebrity endorsements of scam investments; South Korea's president appoints the head of a new agency that took over prosecutors’ investigative powers; Taiwan blocks Coinbase and Kalshi over suspected betting on its November local elections.
October 04 – October 10
China's labor ministry proposes wage and other protections for gig workers, including delivery workers; Hong Kong opens nominations for the Election Committee that chooses the city's chief executive and nearly half of its legislature; Japan's antitrust regulator raids Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo, and Suntory on suspicion of fixing beer prices; South Korea's chief justice rejects what he calls presidential interference in his nomination of a Supreme Court candidate; Taiwan's Constitutional Court strikes down pre-approval of immigration ads as a violation of free speech.
September 27 – October 03
China announces additional details of summit-related agreements with the United States; Chinese police gain expanded powers to conduct remote cybersecurity inspections of companies; Hong Kong national security police arrest a journalist on suspicion of sedition after he filmed a gathering that marked the anniversary of a 2019 police raid on protesters; Japan empowers its police and military to disable servers to stop serious cyberattacks; South Korea replaces its powerful Supreme Prosecutors' Office with a new, pared-down prosecution service; Taiwan's opposition-controlled legislature rejects all twenty-seven of President Lai Ching-te's nominees to the Control Yuan, the branch of government that investigates and impeaches officials.
There is no question that the post-WW II international order is undergoing major challenges and disruptions. These disruptive forces have also placed enormous pressure on international law leading some to declare its death. However, there is also a growing counter-narrative which perhaps was best articulated by The Nobel Committee in announcing Navi Pillay as the 2026 Peace Prize recipient: "Nonetheless, we have seen that more and more conflicts are being addressed through diplomacy, treaties and legal mechanisms, rather than threats, violence and warfare. Leaders and populations alike have come to the same conclusion: international law is a foundation for a more peaceful world.” Nilufer Oral, director of the Centre of International Law at the National University of Singapore and a member of the UN International Law Commission, will examine how international law has constructed the foundation for peaceful order, and why it will continue to do so despite ongoing wars and attempts to dismantle the existing international institutional order conducted under the United Nations-based multilateral system.
Professor José Enrique Alvarez will be the moderator.