The Indonesian government has alternately ignored and respected the customary land rights of local people in its land policies since colonial times. Since the start of democratisation at the end of the 1990s, the trend to uphold customary land rights has become apparent at the national level. This study examines their status in the field, using the case of land grabbing on Padang Island, Riau Province, Indonesia. The findings include the company’s continued practice of purchasing land areas from local people at a lower price, not as compensation, because the company has not yet recognised the customary land rights. However, the local people contest the negotiation for a higher price through the newly introduced transparent practice of land transactions, involving village officers. The recommendation by the Mediation team to respect customary land rights is thus still a work in progress.

This article contributes to the “praxiological turn” in legal pluralism studies by offering an ethnomethodological re-reading of Masaji Chiba’s theory. Responding to critiques of its “rigidity,” it reframes Chiba’s theoretical “three dichotomies” not as static classificatory categories, but as a set of heuristic questions for discovering the practical methods members use to accomplish a pluralistic legal order. This approach reveals how legal pluralism is achieved in situ. It demonstrates that normative tensions—such as official/unofficial—are not pre-existing structures but are dynamically produced by participants in their moment-to-moment interaction. An analysis of Japanese lay judge deliberations illustrates how these dichotomies function as practical resources that members use to organize and negotiate “contested modernities.” This perspective unlocks the potential of Chiba’s legacy for empirically elucidating the interactional foundations of law as a lived phenomenon.

Compliance with court decisions is essential for the rule of law. Generally, regimes comply with decisions that serve their interests; however, compliance with decisions against government interests is less certain. In 1947–2005 and 2014–2023, the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SCP) decided many politically important cases in favour of the prevailing authoritarian and hybrid regimes. However, between 2005 and 2013, although the SCP reached decisions against the government’s interests in politically important cases, the government still complied. Why would authoritarian and hybrid regimes, such as those in Pakistan between 2005 and 2013, comply with decisions in politically important cases that were against their interests instead of disobeying or ignoring them? Very few studies have addressed this puzzling phenomenon. This article argues that increasing public support for courts coupled with reinforcement mechanisms—supported by both the judiciary and external actors—contributes to such compliance. The article concludes that a combination of social, political, and legal factors is essential for compliance by authoritarian and hybrid regimes in politically important cases.

Sri Lanka is immersed in the ideology of Buddhist primacy: “the island belongs to its Sinhala Buddhists, and Buddhism should dominate the state.” Why does this ideology attract? The standard answer is that it justifies the power of the Sinhala Buddhist ethnic group. This article offers a different take through two contestations of modernity. It draws from Sabhyatva Rajya Kara or Towards a Civilisation-State by the Sinhala public intellectual Gunadasa Amarasekara, and the work of post-secular thinkers such as Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, and Nicholas Wolterstorff, and argues that, along with power, Buddhist primacy attracts because it offers an invitation to join a dignifying, heroic narrative, and a vision of “fullness.” That is, there is more to Buddhist primacy than power. This points to the need for a richer human anthropology, and a fuller account of religion, in studies of religion and constitutions.

The crime of rape has been postulated as an unlawful violation of an individual’s rights or interests. However, this article argues that sexual violence against women in Thailand was traditionally viewed as a breach of an interpersonal hierarchy. It was not until the modern criminalization of rape that lawyers attempted to identify the victim’s individual rights as the essence of the crime. By examining the legal techniques employed by these lawyers in drafting, implementing, and adjudicating the crime, the article contends that the voices and demands of female subjects of rape have been silenced or misplaced. The article will offer studies of legal techniques used by lawyers from various institutions in articulating rape and constructing its subjects from the 19th century to the present. This jurisprudence provides context for the current debate on sexual violence in Thailand and makes it possible to critically reassess the right-based conceptualization of rape law.

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.

This article argues that contemporary Indian law is animated by two intertwined imaginings of law: as a rational, rule-bound process and as a power that makes decisions as a normless act of prerogative. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi’s terrorism courts, the paper examines petitions written by individuals accused under anti-terror laws, revealing how these texts invoke the dual legal imaginaries. Petitions—ranging from formal legal documents to handwritten pleas—are analysed through the idea of epistolarity, to pay attention to both the form and content of these petitions. The article argues that these letters are affective and rhetorical performances that simultaneously invoke imaginings of the law as both rule and prerogative. In doing so, the subjectivity of the petitioners oscillates between rights-bearing citizens and humble supplicants praying for the law’s intervention.

This article examines systemic rivalry between Indonesian criminal justice agencies, highlighting the inherent conflicts that arise when institutional actors with distinct values and priorities interact. It argues that analysing these conflicts reveals underlying power dynamics that hinder the system’s effectiveness. Indonesia serves as a compelling case study for analysing inter-agency conflict, where the source of conflict transcends procedural differences and stems from a power struggle driven by institutional self-preservation. Utilizing interviews, court decisions, media reports, and legislative analysis, this article delves into the power struggle between the police, prosecutors, and the anti-corruption agency (KPK). The analysis reveals the police to be at the centre of this conflict, resisting reforms that threaten their institutional survival. This article then argues that substantial reform of Indonesia’s criminal justice system would be difficult to achieve, as such rivalry is driven by patronage politics both within and outside the institution.

This paper empirically examines the conflict between official and unofficial law, focusing on cases where discrepancies arise between registered titleholders and owners based on customary rights in Japan’s common forests. In Japan, compliance-oriented legalization has progressed, and recent legal reforms have framed common forests with irregular registrations as “abandoned lands with unknown owners.” Interviews with commoners revealed a weakening confidence in their customary rights, leading to a lack of resistance to demands for registration regularization. However, a nationwide survey of forestry cooperatives showed that common forests are often well-managed due to economies of scale. In practice, legal relationships are frequently established with representatives of commoner groups, bypassing the need to trace all heirs of outdated titleholders, thereby mitigating the tragedy of the anti-commons. However, this practice stems from the high costs of complying with official law and does not signify a revival of customary rights. In fact, forestry cooperatives that placed emphasis on registration were confronted with difficulties in managing common forests.

Modernity has been the idée fixe of law and society scholarship from the very beginning. It is impossible to imagine our field without its roots in the rather different theories of Weber, Marx, and Durkheim about the defining characteristics of a modern legal system; and their theories still resonate in the work of 21st-century researchers. Moreover, pre-modern law and post-modern law, as their names suggest, are also defined and analysed by law and society scholars in relation to the central concept of modernity. Modernity and its pre- and post-incarnations are the very bedrock of the law and society field.

This study examines how Egyptian law recognizes and deals with land that is stipulated as state property, but has been informally used and/or acquired by individuals as private property. A case in point is Warraq Island in Egypt, whose land became the target of the government’s initiative to remove illegal occupations on the so-called state-owned land. In July 2017, government forces arrived on the island to enforce the order, but they encountered fierce resistance from the residents. Since then, both parties have been involved in negotiations to agree on a viable solution. It is important to note that in Egypt, the state often exerts control over the legal system, based on its own interests. However, such actions tend to fail in light of legal challenges by various actors or widespread demonstrations that may not be legally sanctioned.

This paper purports to identify the origin of farmland disputes in Myanmar triggered by the 2012 land law reform, and the attitudes of mediators. While 120 interviewed farmers showed a strong perception of the traditional right of farming to their ancestral land Bobwapaingmyae, the land administrators believe such a traditional right was lost with the formal registration of “cultivation right.” To fill such a perception gap, village mediators apply a legal pluralist view that both rights can exist in parallel. Once, however, a farmer separates his “cultivation right” from Bobwapaingmyae and places it in the market through sales or mortgages, the disputes come under the formal system where legal positivism governs. But the authors found the tendency of formal forums which affirm the claims of Bobwapaingmyae lacking the registration upon the proof of “actual cultivation,” revealing a legal postulate that sustains the substantive value of livelihood protection upon a condition of formalistic appearance of the asserted right, as a compromise between plural legal regimes.

The term “customary law” is a label given by outsiders to what is simply the “law” for the local people. This article proposes an analytical framework for the case studies in this special issue in observing the normative contests through land and forestry dispute resolution in Asia and Africa, as a challenge to a changing regime of positive law under the pressures of contemporary “legal transplant.” A comparative view across jurisdictions may tell us the commonalities as well as the variation of the modes of normative modification through dialogues. As an attempt to demonstrate such an analytical approach, this article looks into the cases of normative resistance by local communities, similarly facing the eviction orders in the context of post-disaster reconstruction: in post-2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in Aceh, Indonesia, and Moken villages in southern Thailand; in the post-2013 Typhoon Yolanda in Leyte, the Philippines; and post-2011 tsunami-affected communities in the East Japan.

This study explores the complexities of land formalization and the ongoing struggles for land justice among the Îgembe of the Kenyan Central Highlands. It begins by reviewing the prevailing argument that the formalization of land rights contributes to socio-economic growth and tenure security in the Global South. The study highlights the relational nature of rights in different contexts in African countries and discusses both the evidence and the scepticism surrounding land formalization. While the aim was to restore land rights to local people from colonial powers, the introduction of land registration in Kenya allowed political elites to appropriate land. The Îgembe people, having experienced land injustice in their local socio-historical context, have navigated the complexities of land disputes using indigenous institutions alongside state legal processes. I argue that success in land disputes often comes from a combination of personal courage and the use of both indigenous and formal legal frameworks.

This study presents a mixed-methods analysis of the integration of social justice into legal practice in Hong Kong. While social justice within the legal field is a growing area of interest, research on how it can be enhanced through legal education remains relatively limited. This study aims to explore how higher education law courses can be leveraged to better incorporate social justice principles into contemporary legal practice. The research adopts a mixed-methods approach, including a quantitative analysis of questionnaires completed by 99 current law students in Hong Kong and a thematic analysis of interviews conducted with 33 students and legal professionals in the region. Findings suggest the potential benefits of increasing the emphasis on social justice within law programs at Hong Kong universities. The study also raises important questions about the optimal content and methods for delivering social justice education in legal curricula.

Recent years have witnessed a “juridical turn” in Chinese environmental governance, emphasising and encouraging legal mobilisation and litigation deployment by citizens to address environmental grievances in either individual or collective forms. This legalisation movement has spawned a budding, socio-legal field of Chinese environmental justice (CEJ), with an ostensible trend towards the legal empowerment of community organisations as “autonomous” litigants representing public interests. Drawing on extensive qualitative data, this study examines how plural, fluid state–society relations are manifested, animated, and permeated in the interactive processes of the CEJ. The analysis reveals four emergent modes of political–organisational connections—the state’s challengers, allies, servants, and subordinates—all of which depend on how the Chinese state interprets their motives for using the law and engaging in litigations, and anticipated effects their legal mobilisation can generate or diffuse in society. The bounded community mobilisation within the CEJ has also embodied the continuing state supremacy and the growing legal responsiveness in the Chinese approach to modernisation. Future theoretical and policy implications for the participatory effectiveness of community organisations in the CEJ are also discussed.

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.

Within Chinese legal studies, the construction of a distinctly Chinese knowledge system emphasising “Chinese subjective consciousness” (中国主体意识) has become a new important agenda. This introductory article responds to this methodological turn and growing interest in a broader intellectual history of Chinese law. Until recently, traditional Western scholarship on Chinese legal history has largely focused on written legal documents, not on their underlying processes of knowledge production. While Chinese scholars acknowledge the significance of (cultural) translation of foreign legal knowledge, the entanglements of Chinese and Western legal genealogies within a knowledge-historical framework remains underexplored. This article introduces a knowledge-historical approach to study Chinese legal history by narrating the history of administrative law through the lens of local knowledge production through cultural translation. It reveals compelling stories of local actors, who engaged with new knowledge of administrative law in multiple processes and layers of knowledge production from the late Qing dynasty to the late 1980s.