Study

This is a reading seminar, which will cover the East Asian law relating to the economic development, business practices, and financial regulation, exclusively focusing on Japan, Korea, and China. The legal system and economic development of these three countries have several features in common, if compared to the Western legal tradition, but the different history, culture, and politics of each country made its legal system distinctive to each other. This course aims to examine both these commonalities and distinctions, and thereby enhance our understanding of these three countries today. We will only cover the laws and practices relating to the corporate business and financial regulation, most of which have been inherited from the West. Such legal system has very little to do with the East Asian legal tradition. In most cases, it was previously based on the European Civil Law system, and recently more and more influenced by the Anglo-American laws and regulations. In this regard, the notions that have been often employed to explain the East Asian distinctions, such as Asian value, Confucianism, and traditional culture, will be rarely used or emphasized in this class. Rather, this course intends to examine how these three countries have struggled to incorporate the Western legal system—with or without its underlying assumptions and background social environments—into their society in a surprisingly limited time. To be sure, such transplant has not always been successful, and we can learn several lessons both from success and failure.