Volume 4, Number 9
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Legal Dialogue, Chinese Style

Legal scholars in China generally refrain from criticizing official policies in public. Qin (Sky) Ma writes that scholars’ response to the feared shutdown of the China Judgments Online (中国裁判文书网) at the end of 2023 was a noteworthy deviation from the norm. It showed that the space for critical discourse, though constrained, is not entirely closed and that strategic engagement by scholars can have impact. 

Volume 4, Number 8
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Feminization of Poverty and Women's Leadership

Poverty is often the face of a woman. Rangita de Silva de Alwis, a member of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, hopes that this year’s meeting of the UN Commission on the Status of Women will help make women the face of anti-poverty solutions.

Volume 3, Number 24
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The Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act: ...

Tamar Groswald Ozery argues that risks to investors may actually be worsened by US enforcement of the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act, which was enacted in the name of investor protection. Ozery describes the HFCA as part of a geopolitical agenda of decoupling, but says it is backfiring by enhancing the Chinese government’s control over Chinese issuers.

Volume 3, Number 20
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The High Price of Lying in US-China Relations

Following the recent Chinese balloon incident, both Washington and Beijing would do well to recall lessons from a failed CIA espionage mission in China 70 years ago, says Jerome A. Cohen. US refusal to acknowledge the CIA’s role resulted in its own agent, John T. Downey, spending almost 21 years in a Chinese prison. The most obvious lesson: how counterproductive it is for governments to engage in lying.

Volume 3, Number 19
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The Future of CEDAW

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, who joined the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women in January 2023, shares her vision for future development of the jurisprudence of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.

Volume 7

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What Japan’s Prefectures Can Teach Us About International Engagement by Subnational Governments

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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.

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From Legality to Justification

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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.