2023 - 2024 ALC Reading Group

The reading for the first meeting is How Asian Should Asian Law Be? – An Outsider’s View by Ralf Michaels. We encourage participants to read from pages 7 to 29. The article is available for download at https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3897/

Picking up from the first session, we will move from an outsider's perspective on Asia law to a South Asian perspective on the West.

The reading for the next session is From civilization to globalization: the ‘West’ as a shifting signifier in Indian modernity by Dipesh Chakrabarty, a renowned Australian-trained Indian historian. Some of you who work on colonialism might know him as part of the subaltern studies.

The suggested reading is Part 1 from 138-147 (9 pages) and Part 3 from 149-150 (1 page). If you have time, feel free to read the whole 15 pages of the article.

The article is attached. Otherwise, it can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649373.2012.636877?scroll=top&needAccess=true&am…

In the last session of this semester,  we will be reading some works from the rising star academic from Vietnam, Bui Ngoc Son. Son is the first professor of Asian laws at the University of Oxford. He works extensively on Vietnamese constitutional law and comparative constitutional law in Asia.

Son's most popular monograph, derived partly from his PhD thesis at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is titled 'Confucian Constitutionalism in East Asia'. The monograph is Son's ambitious project to mix Western liberalism and East Asian Confucianism in contemporary constitutional law.

For the purpose of learning about Vietnamese law and Son's East Asian project, we will read an excerpt from the 'Modern Confucian Constitution' chapter (pages 117-129) and then Son's attempt to synthesise Confucianism with Human Rights (pages 179-185).

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/reader.action?docID=4406484&ppg=188&c=RVBVQg

The Asian Law and CILIS reading groups will together discuss the theme of patronage and clientelism in Indonesia and Southeast Asia.

We will read Chapter 4, 'Bureaucracy, Reason, and Ritual' from Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia by Tony Day. Please read from pages 166-178  and 205-227 (25 pages). Fluid Iron can be read online here.

The Asian Law reading group will discuss regionalism in Africa. Magdalena Sylister (or Magda) kindly recommended the reading for this week and will be joining the reading session.

The reading for this week is  'The Road to East African Integration' by Wanyama Masinde and Christopher Otieno Omolo, in East African Community Law: Institutional, Substantive and Comparative EU Aspects (Brill, 2017).

Magda also suggests that we skim through the Britannica pages on The Non-Aligned Movement and Pan-Africanism.

With the generous help of our friend Karen Li, who is visiting CILIS until next year, we will explore the relations between indigenous people, and law and politics in Taiwan.

The reading for this session is Wang Ting-jieh, 'Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of the Environment in Taiwan', in Chia-yuan Huang, Daniel Davies, Dafydd Fell (eds.), Taiwan’s Contemporary Indigenous Peoples, 2021, New York : Routledge, 223-238.

For those interested in Taiwan as Austronesian (meaning Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, and island groups in central and south Pacific), Karen recommends the following article as a supplementary reading: Daniel Davies, 'The Austronesian Narrative: The Role of Indigenous Heritage in Taiwanese Diplomacy', in the same book.

The reading for this session is recommended by Tina. Here is Tina's explanation of the reading: This is not technically a chapter about Chinese law, but it provides a very good context in which Chinese law is situated. The larger benefit this reading offers is actually the author's take on culture, tradition and value, which can be helpful for people doing research in non-Western contexts in general.

The reading for this session is 'Memories, Construction, and Structures of Tradition' from Børge Bakken's The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China.

The reading for the session will be "Official Nationalism and Imperialism" from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. This specific chapter explores a form of nation state making, the official nationalism, in Europe and Asia.

Following on from Dr Sally Low's Book Launch last week, the reading for this session will be a chapter from her book, Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French.