Constitutional Courts In Asia

A comparative, systematic and critical analysis of constitutional courts and constitutional review in Asia.

This book discusses court-oriented legal reforms across Asia with a focus on the creation of ‘new courts’ over the last 20 years. Contributors discuss how to judge new courts and examine whether the many new courts introduced over this period in Asia have succeeded or failed. The ‘new courts’ under scrutiny are mainly specialist courts, including those established to hear cases involving intellectual property disputes, bankruptcy petitions, commercial contracts, public law adjudication, personal law issues and industrial disputes. The justification of the trend to ‘judicialize’ disputes has seen the invocation of Western-style rule of law as necessary for the development of the market economy, democratization, good governance and the upholding of human rights. This book also includes critics of court building who allege that it serves a Western agenda rather than serving local interests, and that the emphasis on judicialization marginalises alternative local and traditional modes of dispute resolution. Adopting an explicitly comparative perspective, and contrasting the experiences of important Asian states - China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei, Thailand and Indonesia - this book considers critical questions including: Why has the ‘new-court model’ been adopted, and why do international development agencies and nation-states tend to favour it? What difficulties have the new courts encountered? How have the new courts performed? What are the broader implications of the trend towards the adoption of judicial solutions to economic, social and political problems? Written by world authorities on court development in Asia, this book will not only be of interest to legal scholars and practitioners, but also to development specialists, economists and political scientists.

New democracies around the world have adopted constitutional courts to oversee the operation of democratic politics. Where does judicial power come from, how does it develop in the early stages of democratic liberalization, and what political conditions support its expansion? This book answers these questions through an examination of three constitutional courts in Asia: Taiwan, Korea, and Mongolia. In a region that has traditionally viewed law as a tool of authoritarian rulers, constitutional courts in these three societies are becoming a real constraint on government. In contrast with conventional culturalist accounts, this book argues that the design and functioning of constitutional review are largely a function of politics and interests. Judicial review - the power of judges to rule an act of a legislature or national leader unconstitutional - is a solution to the problem of uncertainty in constitutional design. By providing insurance to prospective electoral losers, judicial review can facilitate democracy.

Analyzes courts in fourteen selected Asian jurisdictions to provide the most up-to-date and comprehensive interdisciplinary book available.

This book illuminates how law and politics interact in the judicial doctrines and explores how democracy sustains and is sustained by the exercise of judicial power.

Comparative constitutional law is a field of increasing importance around the world, but much of the literature is focused on Europe, North America, and English-speaking jurisdictions. The importance of Asia for the broader field is demonstrated here i

Public Law in East Asia is a collection of the leading English-language articles on constitutional and administrative law in the Asian region, written by many of the leading scholars from this area. The region has its own distinct legal and political traditions, and its systems of government have facilitated dynamic economic growth, but the role of public law has not been well understood. Covering a wide range of jurisdictions in a single volume, this collection provides insights into the ways in which institutions of Western origin have been integrated into Asian political and legal cultures, producing new syntheses.