ABSTRACT Supply chains play a pivotal role in global economic relations, fostering growth, employment, and poverty alleviation. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) are central actors in these chains, bearing responsibilities towards workers and the environment. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) standards guide MNEs in assessing the societal and environmental impacts of their activities, though these standards remain largely voluntary. Recent investment treaty practice shows a trend to incorporate CSR provisions in international investment agreements (IIAs), but such clauses fail to impose direct human rights, labour and environmental obligations on investors. Amidst this landscape, the EU and China, major players in global trade and investment, have established diverging legal and policy frameworks to build responsible and sustainable supply chains. Considering these developments, the objectives of this article are twofold. First, the article explores the integration of CSR in international investment law. Second, it evaluates the different CSR initiatives taken by the EU and China that frame their foreign direct investments. Focusing on EU–China FDI relations, the article delineates implications for global supply chain governance offering insights into the evolving landscape of CSR frameworks, and the plagued path in adopting mandatory corporate responsibility standards.

ABSTRACT Standard-essential patents (SEPs) are specific types of patents that protect the technology incorporated in a standard. China has one of the world’s largest telecommunication markets, and its legal policies and practices regarding SEP protection profoundly influence the competitive environment of the Chinese telecommunication market, international economic and trade cooperation, and global telecommunication technology innovation. Recently, frequent disputes in the communication sector surrounding SEPs in China’s judicial practice revolved around the fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) principles, embodying three key issues: patent hold-up, licence fee rates, and anti-suit injunction. Regarding the patent hold-up and hold-out of SEPs in the telecommunication industry, a balance of interests between SEP holders and implementers in licence negotiations should be achieved under the guidance of the principles of FRAND from the perspective of legislation, administrative management, and the judiciary. Concerning licence fee rates, billing benchmarks should be judged based on individual cases, utilizing a comprehensive approach combining comparable licence agreement methods and top-down methods to determine a fair and reasonable licencing fee acceptable to all parties. In the conflict between anti-suit and anti–anti-suit injunctions, improving the anti-suit injunction rules and international cooperation mechanisms is necessary to achieve fair and non-discriminatory judicial processes and judgment results.

ABSTRACT This article considers the evolution of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) – with a particular focus on intellectual property, trade, and sustainable development. This narrative concentrates on the position of Australia – while also discussing the interests of other participating nations. This article charts the aims and objectives of the intellectual property chapter of RCEP. It explores the copyright provisions of RCEP – considering the implications for access to knowledge, innovation, and competition. This article examines the treatment of trade mark law, Internet Domain Names, and geographical indications. It evaluates the regime for patent law and related rights such as data protection, trade secrets, and biologics – with a particular concern for access to medicines and the COVID-19 crisis. It also explores sui generis regimes of intellectual property – such as plant breeder's rights, access to genetic resources, and Indigenous intellectual property. The conclusion considers the future of RCEP – especially given competing mega agreements such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP); the Belt Road Initiative; and the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity.

ABSTRACT In the 2020s, special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have swiftly emerged as an alternative vehicle for global corporations that seek a public listing. This article aims to critically analyse the regulatory frameworks governing SPAC listings in three prominent common law jurisdictions: the United Kingdom, Singapore, and Hong Kong. It evaluates the latest corporate share listing reforms from a comparative perspective, shedding light on how each jurisdiction adapts to the dynamic nature of SPACs and addresses rising challenges regarding investor protection under their new listing regimes. The discussion focuses on the influence of international best practices and the cooperation among global regulatory authorities. By providing an in-depth comparative analysis of SPAC listing rules in London, Singapore, and Hong Kong, this article offers valuable insights for researchers, legal practitioners, policymakers, public companies, and their investors who seek to understand the regulatory landscape for SPACs and innovative corporate regimes in leading financial centres. The findings enhance our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the SPAC regulatory frameworks in each of the three jurisdictions, thus assisting stakeholders in making informed decisions in the rapidly evolving global financial landscape.

ABSTRACT The study of corruption as a violation of human rights has been growing since the adoption of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption in 2003, as exemplified by the adoption of the United Nations General Assembly political declaration regarding commitment to effectively prevent and combat corruption in 2021. Corruption has devastating impacts on human rights, but it has not yet been legally established as a violation of human rights. The current scholarship on corruption as a violation of human rights is heavily dominated by legal research; therefore, the state-of-the-art of this article is the combination of international relations and legal theory. This article analyses the work of the norm entrepreneur in transforming corruption as a violation of human rights from an emerging norm into a legal norm. The concept of international norm dynamics is utilized to assess the stage of norm development. Interactional legal theory is used as a guide to suggest that the norm entrepreneur focuses on the subsequent norm entrepreneurship based on the standard of legality. This article argues that the transformation of an emerging norm into a legal norm is possible; however, its feasibility depends on the continuous work of the norm entrepreneur to fulfil the standard of legality.

ABSTRACT The current reform of China’s Arbitration Law is aimed at making the country a more attractive seat for international commercial arbitration and at encouraging consensual dispute settlement to supplement the heavy workload of the courts. At the same time, due to the lack of certainty as to the arbitrability of antitrust disputes, the competition-related arguments may effectively stall or delay arbitration proceedings or create the risks of setting aside of arbitral awards on public policy grounds. The paper addresses the aforementioned problem by advancing a call for conditional arbitrability of antitrust disputes in China, which will require clarification of the applicable legal standards and detailed procedural guidance by the Supreme People’s Court that would instruct the arbitrators and the parties about applying competition rules in the context of contractual disputes. This policy proposal is grounded on the analysis of the divergent judicial approaches to arbitrability of competition-related issues developed by the Chinese judiciary.

ABSTRACT This symposium essay offers some generalized theoretical propositions on the connection between authoritarianism and legality. It suggests that there are least some sociopolitical contexts in which authoritarian regimes may be even more strongly motivated to pursue legality than their democratic peers. This conjecture comes in three steps: first, authoritarian regimes fear organic social mobilization significantly more than their democratic peers. This incentivizes them, especially in larger, more diverse societies with less predictable sociopolitical landscapes, to pursue the atomized governance of society. Second, legality is, at its core, an institutional design that both responds to and produces social atomization. Not only is law a necessary ordering device in stranger-oriented societies where communal self-governance and self-regulation is unlikely to be effective, but it also produces reliance effects that render social relations more distant. Third, combining these two arguments, in very large, very diverse societies, authoritarian regimes may have even stronger incentives to pursue law-centric modes of sociopolitical ordering than do democratic ones. This does not necessarily mean that they will always act upon such incentives, but it does offer a deeper explanation for why the Chinese regime in particular is very unlikely to decisively abandon its current legalistic trajectory at any point in the foreseeable future. This is very much a thought experiment, but hopefully, one that offers useful ideas for future research.

ABSTRACT In this essay, I use Professor Shucheng Wang's recent book Law as an Instrument: Sources of Chinese Law for Authoritarian Legality as a point of departure for reconsidering the conventional opposition between liberal and authoritarian forms of legality. I suggest that opposition is in turn embedded in an even more elemental distinction between different state forms. Turning to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, I first investigate the historical and geopolitical processes by which modern political theory reduced the political universe into three species of states (republics, monarchies, and despotisms) and then merely two (democracies and authoritarian states). I then turn to the contemporary genealogy of the concept of rule of law, which arose first as a critique of the rise of the administrative state in the West and then became a means to delegitimize socialist conceptions of legality. I conclude by focusing on the People's Republic of China to evaluate the utility of assessing its legal order in terms of authoritarian legality as well as in terms of democracy more generally.

ABSTRACT In recent years, the concept of authoritarianism has risen to prominence in the community of legal scholars studying non-democratic regimes. China’s legality is also described as authoritarian. However, what does it mean to label China as having a system of authoritarian law? The concept of authoritarianism, and by extension, authoritarian legality, is yet underexamined. This article discusses how China, as a single-party state, differs from other authoritarian regimes in developing its own brand of authoritarian legality that I describe as legal gradationalism. China's authoritarian legality is characterized by a rejection of judicial independence and the mixing of law and quasi-law instruments. Drawing from Shucheng Wang's Law as an Instrument, I propose that a gradationalist approach to Chinese legality allows us to more fully understand the behaviour of Chinese courts and the intriguing dynamics between the Supreme People's Court (SPC) and the local courts.