Ahead-of-Publication / Just-Accepted

The rapid development and widespread application of artificial intelligence (AI) are profoundly shaping the evolution of dispute resolution mechanisms, including arbitration, while offering novel solutions to longstanding challenges in the current arbitration system. Rooted in the principle of party autonomy, the arbitration system entitles disputing parties to select arbitrators by mutual agreement. In practice, however, this framework has given rise to issues such as malicious delay tactics by parties, difficulties in appointing qualified arbitrators, all of which undermine the fairness and efficiency that are foundational to arbitration. While AI-assisted arbitrator selection can address these aforementioned problems, it also raises concerns from a rule of law standpoint. Key issues include algorithmic manipulation that impairs party autonomy, data collection practices that infringe on arbitrators’ data privacy, and tensions between computational rationality and the emotional or normative dimensions inherent arbitration. To address these concerns, inclusive legislation should create room for the integration of AI into arbitration; concurrently, industry regulation and arbitration soft law should be leveraged to demystify “black box algorithms” and standardize AI-driven arbitrator selection processes. These measures will help safeguard the credibility of arbitration and foster the healthy development of the arbitration system in the age of AI. The convergence of AI and arbitration further prompts critical reflection on the transformation of the legal discourse system amid technological advancement. In this context, the law should adopt an inclusive yet prudent stance toward technological progress, both preserving space for ongoing innovation while establishing boundaries to prevent technology from fundamentally upending the existing legal system and social order. This balanced approach – pursuing stability through reform and advancing development through change – should serve as the guiding principle for the evolution of the arbitration system in the AI era.

The Basic Law serves as the foundation of Hong Kong’s governance and its unique status under Chinese sovereignty, yet its interpretation and implementation have often sparked debate and controversy since the 1997 handover. This study conducts a corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the recontextualization of the Basic Law in the influential English-language newspaper, South China Morning Post , over a 25-year period (1997–2022). The aim is to uncover diachronic changes in how the Basic Law has been recontextualized by integrating text mining with critical discourse studies. The findings identify three distinct periods of recontextualization, each characterized by particular patterns and approaches. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the Basic Law’s recontextualization and highlights the benefits of combining text mining with critical discourse analysis.

China has aimed to develop one of the most extensive courtroom broadcasting systems in the world. Initially introduced as part of judicial reforms to enhance transparency, the system sought to normalise the live broadcasting of court trials, allowing the public to observe judicial proceedings in real time. This article evaluates how the system has operated in practice. Drawing on policy documents and empirical evidence, it argues that the broadcasting initiative became increasingly resisted by judges and courts and shaped by a court-centric logic due to administrative pressures and concerns over risks. Since around 2020, courtroom live broadcasts have gradually been suspended. Courts have scaled back their use and adopted a more managed and selective approach. This article analyses the reasons for this shift and concludes that meaningful reform is now required to ensure the system can continue to serve its stated objectives in a sustainable and principled manner.

The Willem C. Vis Moot is a global competition where university teams test their advocacy skills in the world of commercial arbitration. Being set in a simulated court, the competition opens a door to the legal professional skills that in many instances remain elusive to university law students. However, such an opportunity does not come without challenges. University students have not the benefit of previous exposure to such professional practices, and hence pleading before the Moot court can be an intimidating experience. Therefore, preparation is key, and this paper addresses the issues of legal counsel discourse that Moot participants need to be aware of when training for the finals. Analysing the winning teams’ pleadings over a period of 10 years, this paper outlines the main rhetorical functions that have been applied by these winning teams. Attending to issues of speech organisation, clarifying the contexts of arguments, regularly referring to the case facts and legal sources, and integrating and rebutting the points provided by opposing counsel were features that occurred consistently throughout the years under analysis. Participants in the Vis Moot can benefit from such insights, as it should make their preparations more efficient and ultimately their pleadings more effective.

Existing models of cyberspace often focus excessively on the technical dimension, failing to systematically integrate the interconnections between network phenomena, security risks, and cyber governance. To bridge this gap, this paper constructs a five-layer analytical framework that deconstructs cyberspace into interconnected geographical, physical, code, information, and social layers, and sequentially conducts a “phenomenon-risk-law” analysis for each layer. Specifically, based on authoritative industry reports, this paper dissects the primary risk phenomena at each level, ranging from geopolitical and supply chain threats at the foundational layers to data breaches and cognitive manipulation at the abstract layers. It then investigates the corresponding legal and governance challenges, revealing differentiated response strategies through a comparative analysis of regulatory practices in China, the United States, and Europe.

Digital trade has emerged as a new driver of global economic growth. However, divergent concerns over digital security and trade development have led countries and regions to adopt various restrictive measures, giving rise to distinct types of digital trade barriers involving the enabling environment for digital trade, technical restrictions, data localization requirements, and intellectual property-related measures. These barriers exert notable influence on China’s digital trade 202 development. Facing the complex challenges of global digital trade governance, China should advance a position that balances security with development and is rooted in domestic practice. Key strategies include fostering a multilateral framework for data governance, strengthening privacy protection and localization mechanisms, promoting fair and equitable digital taxation rules, and enhancing the national data governance system through a multi-level strategic approach.

Research grant corruption in higher education institutions, which remains a relatively rare enterprise in the field of white-collar crimes, has been unchecked in China in recent years. This study takes the indicative approach to access 14 research grant corruption cases in higher education institutions in Beijing, China, from 2014 to 2022. The results show that grant corruption in higher education institutions emerged with particular characteristics, with a limited number of cases proceeding into criminal trials. It is found that joint crime is common in cases involving embezzlement, where offenders, often senior intellectuals in senior-ranked positions, adopt direct approaches to committing the crime. The causes of research grant corruption in higher education institutions were multifaceted, forming an opportunity triangle of three parties in higher education institution funding: the funding organizations, the commissioned organization (higher educational institutions), and the funded (researchers). A lack of communication between the funding organizations and those who are funded, inadequate supervision of the commissioned organization, and a paucity of funding audits are believed to be the leading causes of higher education institution funding corruption, which helps breed opportunities for monopolizing research funding. The study also provides countermeasures to intercept corruption opportunities and prevent research grant embezzlement, including audit scrutiny, research fund reimbursement and reform, and risk prevention mechanisms.

In theory, the owner of intellectual property (IP) has the right to utilize it for profitable purposes. It is well acknowledged that the mutual objectives of IP law and competition law are to foster competition. Nonetheless, anti-competitive behaviors, such as refusing to grant IP licenses, are forbidden by Pakistan’s competition law and may be considered as an abuse of market dominating position. Due to their generality and absence of a clear methodology for evaluation, Pakistan’s anti-trust laws pertaining to the refusal to license IP provide too much latitude to the Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) in interpreting the legislation. The EU and China, the two main antitrust authorities in the modern world, have independent stances when it comes to rejecting IP licenses. By looking at comparative experiences, the EU’s strategy makes greater sense for Pakistan. By recognizing the importance of IP and its impact on innovation, it is recommended that Pakistan need to implement a clear-up standard to evaluate situations involving IP refusals under the Competition Act. Provisions about the remedy of a license denial should be included in Pakistani law in the interim. Regarding the denial of licenses, Pakistan might increase the transparency of its anti-monopoly legislation and establish a steady expectation, domestically and internationally, for technological endeavors. If enacted, these suggestions would enhance the application of Pakistani competition law in the region and give Pakistani courts and the CCP more detailed instructions on how to handle future interactions regarding the refusal to license IP and competition law.

This paper examines how cyber partnerships, constituted by countries and international organizations, are discursively represented, using a corpus of cybersecurity policy documents during the Obama, Trump and early-Biden administrations. Drawing upon critical discourse analysis, this paper investigates how power is exercised through these policy texts to achieve specific communicative goals. Taking a diachronic corpus-assisted approach, this paper identifies the discursive shifts in the three administrations’ perceptions of cyber allies, enemies and frenemies, constructing a dynamic “friends versus foes” ideological structure in the US cybersecurity policy discourse. The policymakers utilize referential and predication strategies to legitimize their allies as ingroup members and their enemies as cyber threats. Moreover, this paper reveals discursive differences in the three administrations’ attitudes towards international organizations regarding cyber governance, with Obama and Biden’s greater willingness to cooperate and Trump’s tendency for alienation. Their particular ways of depicting cyber partnerships are contingent upon geopolitical dynamics and contrasting ideologies. Thus, this paper suggests that a country’s cyber partnerships can be transient in nature and are subject to historical (re)definition and governments’ ideological preferences. It is hoped that this paper contributes a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between language, power and socio-politics in cyber partnership discourse.

The legal language has been extensively studied due to its profound and far-reaching impact on society. Among the various research areas, the complexity of legal language has received particular attention due to its implications for legal practice and societal access to justice. Relevant studies seek to identify the factors contributing to the difficulty of legal language and explore potential methods of simplification. However, despite extensive qualitative research, a comprehensive, quantitative analysis of the essential linguistic features distinguishing legal language from everyday language remains underexplored. The present study fills this gap and quantitatively examines the key features of German legal language by comparing it to journalistic language as a benchmark for everyday discourse, providing a rigorous, corpus-based perspective on the lexical, syntactic, and typological features of legal texts. Using data from the HDT-UD and DGT-UD treebanks, the study analyzes 18 quantitative indicators across three linguistic domains – lexicon, syntax, and word-order typology. The results indicate that legal language is characterized by a limited vocabulary, a higher frequency of long words and dependent clauses, increased syntactic and structural complexity, and a predominance of SV and OV word order patterns. By providing a detailed comparison of legal and journalistic registers, this study advances the understanding of legal language through objective, empirical analysis. The findings have practical implications for legal communication, suggesting that greater attention to lexical simplification and syntactic clarity could improve accessibility and comprehension.