The paper is based on my contributions to the East Asia Forum blog (and my partially overlapping "Japanese Law and the Asia Pacific" blog) drawing mainly on developments from the end of 2008 through to mid-2009. Many topics are important not only within Australia and Japan, but also potentially...

States across Asia have long engaged in international investment treaty making, and to a lesser extent in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) proceedings. Engagement has intensified partly as bilateral investment treaties (BITs) proliferated especially from the 1990s, but also Asian states...

The Australian Government is undertaking public consultations over possible improvements to the 2010 Australian Consumer Law (ACL) regime, including again the idea of adding a European-style general safety provision (GSP). To bolster the case for such reform, Part 2 of this paper analyses 2017-9...

Independent director requirements have spread throughout Asia, generating diverse definitions, enforcement patterns and cadres of directors (Part I). Yet the proliferation itself, and some of its features, provide some support for convergence in corporate governance, especially in function...

New Zealand's newly elected Labour coalition government announced in October 2017 that it would not agree to investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions in future trade and investment agreements, and would try to amend them in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. This has...