Japan has recently signed a comprehensive free trade agreement with the EU, the Japan-EU Economic Partnership Agreement or JEEPA. JEEPA made some tentative steps towards addressing the digital transformation, yet refrained from the US promoted (and then abandoned) model of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which enshrined protections for free data flows and against data localization...
Free Speech, Free Finance, and the Anti-Entrenchment Principle
I examine how governments use their “power of the purse“ to limit speech critical of their policies. An increasingly popular justification is that since government represents the people, and its policies are chosen by “the people,“ it is under no obligation to finance such views. Current free speech doctrine does not address such arguments successfully,...
Friend and Enemy Revised: Derrida and The Politics of Friendship
In one of his most famous book, Der Begriff des Politischen, Carl Schmitt wrote that the one of the essential debate on political refers to the differentiation between friend and enemy. This affirmation has been repeated over the decades. Nonetheless, Jacques Derrida has demonstrated a crucial mistake on Schmitt’s notion of the political. In his...
From Institutional Interaction to Institutional Integration: The National Supervisory Commission and China‘s New Anti-corruption Model
How does the establishment of the National Supervisory Commission affect China‘s capacity to curb corruption? Using published materials and fieldwork data, this article addresses this question by comparing the newly established single anti-corruption agency with the previous dual-track anti-corruption system. It firstly examines the previous system by focusing on four dimensions of the interaction between...
From migrant to commodities: international human rights protection and the growing privatisation of migration management
As the immigration debate tops policy makers‘ agendas, the classical migration patterns and policies are challenged by how globalisation has transformed boarders. States, especially western democracies, attempt to find new modes of governance. They do so, notably, by involving non-state actors such as NGOs, international organisations, and private companies in their migration management policies. The...
From Political Constitution to Staatscrecht
Since 2008, China‘s constitutional scholarship has brought the controversy between political constitutionalism and normative constitutionalism. China‘s political constitutionalism has its unique social background, which is influenced by Britain‘s political constitution. However, there is not a lot of consensus within Chinese political constitutional scholarship;and, there is a different theoretical background from UK. Although China also adopts...
From protecting individual rights to protecting the public: the changing parameters of populist driven criminal law and penal policy
It had been the case that in advanced liberal democracies, criminal law and penal policy were bound by clearly defined parameters, that then helped to distinguish governance in the democracies from the non-democratic world. And one of the features of citizenship in the democracies was the importance that was given to protecting individual rights in...
From Transmission Belts to (Semi)Autonomous Actors – Chief Justices in Slovakia
Thhis paper analyses various roles of the Chief Justices in Slovakia after the split of Czechoslovakia. It explores whether Slovak Chief Justices still operate as “transmission belts“ of the Slovak ruling political elites, like in the communist era, and how much influence they have over careers of rank-and-file judges. It shows that Chief Justices in...
Gay Visibility and the Family
The question of family formation has emerged as the core of the struggle for gay rights, as evidenced by recent cases on same-sex marriage around the world. Long before the marriage debate, however, courts were already engaging with the relationship between homosexuality and family. This paper draws on theories of gay visibility to re-examine the...
Gender and Ethnic Diversity in International Arbitration
The absence of women in international arbitration causes concerns from an equality perspective but also from a representational democracy perspective. Put differently, the absence of women constitutes an issue for the legitimacy of such jurisdictions. This is problematic given that an increasing number of issues are “litigated“ via arbitration and that in certain areas, such...