ABSTRACT This paper examines the affinities between Franz Kafka and Hans Kelsen, focusing on their shared critique of ideology and the dynamics of law and authority. Through an analysis of The Trial and Kelsen’s Pure Theory of Law, it highlights their mutual engagement with the paradox of law as simultaneously omnipresent and unattainable. Particular attention is given to their rhetorical strategies such as humour and metaphors which illuminate their critical stance toward the reification of law. Kafka’s literary critique of legal absurdity parallels Kelsen’s efforts to expose the ideological underpinnings of legal structures. The paper analyses the proximity between these two figures, showing how their distinct methods converge on a shared concern with law’s legitimacy, form, and ideological function. By juxtaposing their works, it offers a nuanced, emancipatory critique of legal systems that balances authority with individual freedom.

Since the launch of the construction of economic regions such as the Guang-dong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA), propositions including region-al economy and regional economic rule of law have attracted considera-ble at-tention. As a cross-jurisdictional economic region, the GBA features dif-ferences among various entities in terms of legal systems, economic policy for-mulation, and supervision of economic activities. How to coordinate the eco-nomic devel-opment of different regions through the rule of law has become the primary is-sue for the GBA’s development. The regional economic rule of law in the GBA should establish an inclusive legal system, balance the interests and legislative powers of various entities, thereby ensuring the gradual implementa-tion of co-ordinated regional economic development. It is also necessary to promote the regional economic legal system guided by the philosophy of "Com-munity with a Shared Future for Mankind," so as to provide a reference for the construction and connection with global economic law in the future.

ABSTRACT Recent anniversary productions of The Trial have demonstrated that Kafka's literary and juridical imagination remains a generative resource for wider legal critique. This essay examines two recent theatrical and audio performances of The Trial: Anmol Vellani's Innocence, a stage reworking which premiered in Bangalore, and Ed Harris's The Trial, a BBC radio play that compresses Kafka's text into a single hour of drama. In tracing how these works retool the novel's attention to procedural opacity for modern audiences, the essay argues that the Kafkaesque is a live aesthetic mode through which anxieties about surveillance, state power, and legal precarity are articulated. Vellani's production foregrounds the weaponisation of law in India's present while Harris's radio drama emphasizes the collapsing distinction between public and private life in contemporary Britain. Counterpointing these adaptations against film versions by Orson Welles and David Jones (by way of Harold Pinter), the essay reflects on why The Trial resonates in the twenty-first century, identifying its qualities for transmedial teleportation that extends its reach across stage, sound, and screen.

ABSTRACT This article examines the treatment of questions of jurisprudence, and its social and political connotations, in Hollywood cinema against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the New Deal, with a focus on one specific film: A Family Affair, made by MGM in 1937. It centred on a small-town judge who incurs the wrath of a wealthy developer when he blocks a lucrative aqueduct project due to his doubts over its propriety, turning the town against him and his family in the process. While the film advocates for the classical jurisprudence that came under heavy criticism from contemporary legal scholars and was heavily associated with conservatism, A Family Affair’s political and social vision are rather more complex and contested in the way it addresses the economic environment of the 1930s and its implications for intergenerational and familial relationships.

ABSTRACT The article examines the production of English colonial legal spaces in seventeenth-century North America. Particularly in Virginia, their production revolved around the concept of ‘plantation’, which points to several legal-horticultural acts, such as planting seeds, improving the land, and civilizing non-Western environments. Made up of gardening, agriculture, and fences, the legal geography of these settlements was built at the expense of the landscape previously created (and inhabited) by Indians. Colonizers transplanted new plants, seeds, and new legal regimes into American soil, which meant dispossessing the Natives, outlawing their titles to the land, and completely reshuffling the landscape. The article focuses on how the colonizers introduced such changes so as to make the landscape reflect their own cultural and legal imaginaries. This was achieved through a legal-horticultural title, the creation of which was part of a broader process of politico-legal invention, also based on exotic legal imaginaries and landscapes. The English socio-cultural capital brought to America was reinvented so as to maximize the profits of the colonial enterprise and reinforce colonial legal geographies.

ABSTRACT In this paper, I develop the groundwork for an imaginative legal education, drawing on historical works of literary and legal studies. After describing the role of the creative imagination (contrasted with repetitive fancy), I turn to imaginative arguments in legal discourse, arguing that they develop law understood multidimensionally – as a form of life and meaning. Although well recognized in theory, the role of imaginative legal education is not systematically applied in continental European educational practice. I take it to be a result of a doctrinal and a detached approach to jurisprudence in European law schools. The doctrinal criticism of interdisciplinary legal education draws on the worry that law, seen as a result of imaginative work is not objective, and thus as contradicting the ideal of the rule of law. In my view, it is exactly legal imagination that, if properly used, guarantees basic rights and secures social expectations in a democratic society.

ABSTRACT In September 1914, Franz Kafka was in Prague working on his new novel, The Trial. While Kafka wrote of Josef K., another man from a nearby village was in Oudtshoorn, South Africa, reading his morning newspaper where he discovered that he, like K., was under arrest without having done anything wrong. He had been declared an enemy subject. This article traces the life of that man – John Bedrick – through the episode of his containment during World War One, highlighting the real-world processes that ran concurrent with those of Kafka’s imagination. It argues that Kafka’s work offers a lens through which to understand the absurdities, uncertainties, and human costs of these early twentieth-century legal-bureaucratic transformations. While locating Bedrick’s story within the historiography of the British wartime civilian internment camp network, the article proposes reading the South African state archive for Kafkaesque cases as a means to better understand the relationship between the governor and the governed.

Article 54 of the 2023 Company Law adds the acceleration of shareholders' cap-ital contribution in non-bankruptcy and non-dissolution situations, which changes the scope of application and legal effects of the acceleration of share-holders' capital contribution to solve the problems caused by the comprehensive subscription system. However, the provisions of Article 54 are highly concise and generalized, and their meanings need to be further interpreted and clarified. Under the current system of limited liability company registered capital with a time limit for subscription, shareholders enjoy term interests, but their term interests have certain boundaries, that is, the company can pay off due debts; otherwise, the company or the creditor with due claims has the right to request the acceleration of shareholders' capital contribution. The applicable condition for the acceleration of shareholders' capital contribution, "unable to pay due debts", should adopt the non-payment theory, i.e., the standard of cessation of payment. The legal consequence of the acceleration of shareholders' capital contribution shall be that the shareholder directly repays the creditor within the scope of his unpaid capital contribution.

The development of the digital economy has brought opportunities, but also triggered many risks and challenges, and antitrust law enforcement and su-per-vision have become more complex. The construction of the antitrust com-pliance system of digital economy platform enterprises not only realizes the full process of antitrust supervision before, during and after the event, but also promotes enterprises to consciously comply with laws and regulations and op-timize the business environment. The "Antitrust Compliance Guidelines for Op-erators" (2024) adds "Compliance Incentives" in the form of a special chapter to effec-tively resolve the problem of insufficient endogenous motivation for cor-porate compliance construction. At the same time, digital platform enterprises should further strengthen and improve the construction of the antitrust com-pliance system in accordance with the guidelines to maintain a fair and compet-itive market order.