Volume 16, Issue 1 - Special Issue: The Past, Present, and Future of Law and Economics in East Asia; Guest editors: Yun-chienn Chang and Jeong-Yoo Kim

This Introduction summarizes the theme of the twelve essays published in the symposium issue of “Past, Present, and Future of Law and Economics in Asia” at the Asian Journal of Law and Economics. Asian jurisdictions are at different economic developmental stages, and my observation is that the development of Law & Economics somewhat tracks the economic performance of the jurisdictions. Asian jurisdictions face common hurdles in spreading the use of Law & Economics.

Law and Economics (L&E), as an interdisciplinary approach, is prominent in Europe and the US but remains preliminary in Hong Kong (HK), with limited progress despite expanding research scope and quantity. This study examines HK law schools’ academic output, analyzing L&E scholars’ composition, research areas, methodologies, and development barriers. Most scholars employ L&E concepts as supplementary tools, while only a few core scholars systematically adopt it as a primary analytical framework. Research focuses on market-related areas such as competition law, financial law, and corporate law, with less focus on fields like private law and criminal law. Empirical methods, cost-benefit analysis, and institutional economics are commonly applied, but diversity and theoretical depth remain inadequate. Structural constraints – legal traditions, educational systems, and limited academic platforms – further impede L&E’s growth in HK. This study advocates interdisciplinary collaboration, research centers, academic support, and broader L&E application in policymaking and judicial processes in HK.

Law and economics was formally introduced to South Korea in the mid-1980s. It was adopted relatively quickly compared to other Asian countries, and both research and education have been actively pursued. As a result, the Korean Law and Economics Association was founded in 2002, promoting research within the country, and many Korean scholars played a significant role in the establishment and development of the Asian Law and Economics Association, founded in 2005. The growth of the law and economics community in Korea can be attributed to the efforts of many pioneering scholars, as well as the smooth interaction between economics and law within academia and practice. To ensure the continued development of this field, it is essential to enhance understanding between economics and law and to sustain efforts to attract new scholars.

In this article, I briefly reviewed the status of the law and economics movement in Singapore. I probed three spheres to describe this status, namely, academia, teaching and judiciary. In short, law and economics is of very little influence in Singapore both intellectually and practically. However, the unpromising position of law and economics is not unique to Singapore, as substantiated by several other pieces in this volume. Therefore, a serious pondering over the underlying cause is probably warranted. Robert Cooter’s call for efforts in the third, content, enterprise of law and economics might help move law and economics closer to the center stage of legal scholarship and practice in Asia.

This review examines the application of empirical methods to legal questions in Taiwan over the past three decades (1994–2024). The chronological trend reveals that the use of empirical methods remains heavily influenced by the doctrinal traditions of mainstream scholarship. The emergence of technological advancements has made empirical methods more accessible. However, the method remains underdeveloped in Taiwan due to the narrowly defined and highly specialized nature of legal scholarship, coupled with a lack of training in empirical methodologies. To address these challenges and facilitate the development of empirical law and economics, I propose three systematic reforms: creating method-based research groups, revising promotion matrices, and reforming legal education.

This article briefly reviews the emerging trends of incorporating law and economics perspectives within the Japanese judiciary. In the first part, I review opinions of Justice Koichi Kusano, the first justice in the history of the Supreme Court to adopt law and economics approaches. In particular, I discuss his two key approaches: the maximization of well-being and the use of quantitative empirical analysis. In the second part, I explore the broader judiciary context, including transformations in the Supreme Court’s majority opinions and the practices of lower courts and lawyers. Specifically, I highlight the Supreme Court’s growing emphasis on empirical data, particularly concerning social circumstances and public attitudes. Additionally, I analyze the subsequent shift in lawyers’ practices, which increasingly include the submission of survey data and statistical evidence. I also present emerging trends in the annual number of court decisions that reference regression analysis.

While the private autonomy is the principle of private law, the standard law and economics has modelled private law as regulatory instruments for correcting market failures. The development of economic analysis of private law in Taiwan, however, has mostly avoided this methodological mistake. In property law, people need rights in rem to show their trading partners and other parties what exact rights they hold. In contract law, a conception of penalty or sticky defaults would increase judges’ cognitive burdens without any benefits therefrom. In tort law, the deterrence model does not fit the law while the risk-allocating model does much better. In legal reasoning, a consent-based conception of legal system rather than legal effectiveness test should be the criteria for applying and enacting law. A judges-centered legal policy-making approach is mission impossible in scientifically studying Taiwan’s private law which is rules-based.

This article reports law and economics activities from Malaysia or by Malaysians. It surveys the resulting literature and identifies selected personalities who have contributed to advancing law and economics research in Malaysia. Other past activities, such as organising an online conference for the Asian Law and Economics Association in 2020, are recounted. It notes the extent to which Malaysian universities offer law and economics courses. The Malaysian government’s requirement for regulatory impact statements is the right direction to instill further interest in law and economics in government officers. Finally, some existing challenges and opportunities for future development are examined for future actions.

The article presents a survey on the adoption and evolution of economic analysis of law in Taiwan’s legal studies. Tracing its earlier introduction into Taiwan during the 1990s, returning scholars with post-graduate training in the United States drove the movement of law and economics literature during the pioneer period before peaking in the mid-2000s. However, there seems to be a gradual decline subsequent since 2006. Despite reduced explicit publications, this article argues that economic concepts continue to influence legal research implicitly with certain core economic concepts often cited in research papers. The article provides an overview of academic literature, examines corporate and financial law fields, judicial incorporation of economic analysis, and university courses, concluding that economic analysis has become an integral component of Taiwan’s legal scholarship.

This paper presents an overview of the development of law and economics in Vietnam. In this respect, we divide the history of law and economics studies in Vietnam using the following milestones: i) the pre 1986 comprehensive economic reform; ii) post 1986 comprehensive economic reform to the early 2000s, iii) the period of more economic opening in the 2000s to the 2020s, and iv) the recent 2020s period onward. This paper employs a qualitative, historical-analytical method to explore the development of economics and law in Vietnam. For each period, we analyzed the institutional and regulatory changes, the impacts of global economic trends, and the role of legal reform in shaping Vietnam’s development trajectory. We discuss two critical drivers of change in economics and law, both professional and academic sides, which are globalization and technological development. We also discuss some challenges that future Vietnamese law and economics studies face.

This paper examines the key provisions of Indian contract law with special reference to commercial contracts. We evaluate how the Indian Contract Act and the Specific Relief Act fare on the efficiency criterion in the economic analysis of the law. Further, we discuss whether the Indian courts use economic reasoning while filling up gaps in commercial contracts and choosing a breach remedy. We argue that the law governing commercial contracts has several inbuilt features that are desirable from an efficiency point of view. However, several factors constrain the efficient adjudication of commercial contracts.