Showing posts with label Daniel Matthews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Daniel Matthews. Show all posts
Saturday, November 13, 2021
Daniel Matthews Awarded the 2021 Penny Pether Prize
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
Daniel Matthews on Reframing Sovereignty For The Anthropocene (Transnational Legal Theory)
Daniel Matthews
Published Online: 2021-5-20
Abstract: Writing on sovereignty has failed to address the challenges associated with planetary climatic change. As debates about the nature of sovereignty return to the fore, there remains little attention paid to how our newly unstable environmental conditions might call for sovereignty to be imagined anew. Drawing on Neil Walker’s account of the ‘sovereignty frame’–as a means of understanding the enduring relevance of sovereignty for contemporary law and politics – this article understands sovereignty as an aesthetic device which constitutively inures political subjects to the ecological forces and relations central to the climate crisis and the broader challenges associated with the Anthropocene. In taking up the task of reframing sovereignty in a way that properly attends to these issues, this article introduces how sovereignty’s spaces, subjects and modes of governance might be reimagined in light of the Anthropocene thesis and the various disruptions it heralds for social life.
Friday, May 28, 2021
Daniel Matthews on Reframing Sovereignty for the Anthropocene (Transnational Legal Theory)
Daniel Matthews
Transnational Legal Theory
Published on 20 May 2021
Abstract: Writing on sovereignty has failed to address the challenges associated with planetary climatic change. As debates about the nature of sovereignty return to the fore, there remains little attention paid to how our newly unstable environmental conditions might call for sovereignty to be imagined anew. Drawing on Neil Walker’s account of the ‘sovereignty frame’–as a means of understanding the enduring relevance of sovereignty for contemporary law and politics – this article understands sovereignty as an aesthetic device which constitutively inures political subjects to the ecological forces and relations central to the climate crisis and the broader challenges associated with the Anthropocene. In taking up the task of reframing sovereignty in a way that properly attends to these issues, this article introduces how sovereignty’s spaces, subjects and modes of governance might be reimagined in light of the Anthropocene thesis and the various disruptions it heralds for social life.
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Dr Daniel Matthews Featured in "The Sovereign State Feels the Heat" (HKU Bulletin)
HKU Bulletin
Volume 22 No. 1
Published in November 2020
However you look at it, the modern state is ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of climate change.
Dr Daniel Matthews of the Faculty of Law is an admirer of English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who defined sovereignty as it is commonly understood: escaping nature under the security and protection of the state through a social contract. Hobbes was writing 400 years ago and today, the cracks are showing.
“Hobbes was extraordinarily creative in rethinking how we define political authority,” Dr Matthews said. “But even though sovereignty is back big time, with Brexit and the rise of populism being examples, I see that as a real dead end for dealing with the challenges of climate change.
“Climate change does not respect state borders and many of its effects are non-anthropocentric, impacting on a range of non-human forces and relations described by geology and ecology. Modern politics is really bad at being sensitive to these forces.”
Dr Matthews has been tracking these shortfalls as a scholar of the history and theory of sovereignty and sees problems in all three components that define sovereignty: territorial, populational and institutional.
... 
Getting people to see the world differently, both in the visual and contemplative sense, will not be easy. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a glimpse of the challenges. “We’ve seen a reassertion of national borders, concentration of power in the hands of the executive, greater emphasis on who gets the privilege of citizenship and who doesn’t. I fear we will see repeats of this in future climatic crises,” he said.
Dr Matthews hearkens back to Hobbes, who was also exploring how politics could be reorganised in a changing world. “This idea that we have to deny our attachments to the natural world in order to create a distinct political sphere is precisely what needs to be reversed. But the way things are going at the moment doesn’t make me massively hopeful,” he said.
“Radical changes need to take place. It can’t be business as usual. Exactly how these changes will be instituted, no one knows. In my own work, I’m hoping to point out the limitations of the existing coordinates that define modern sovereignty and encourage critical and creative thinking about the changing nature of political authority in the context of climatic transformation.”
The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2021. Click here to read the full text.
Friday, October 30, 2020
HKU Law Teachers Recognised by Teaching Excellence Awards 2019
Six HKU Law teachers were recognised in the 2019 HKU Teaching Excellence Awards for individual and group efforts.
Congratulations to the following colleagues:
- Ms Alice Lee who won the University Distinguished Teaching Excellence Award. Alice has been teaching and researching copyright law for more than 20 years. She has obtained nine Teaching Development Grants and one KE grant, and received three university-level teaching awards including the University Distinguished Teaching Award 2019. She promotes and facilitates Teaching & Learning initiatives as Associate Dean (Academic Affairs) of the Law Faculty, as Chair of the University Teaching Exchange Fellowship Scheme, and as a Senior Fellow and an accredited mentor of the UK Higher Education Academy. Her most recent work is the project on 'the Copyright Classroom'. The copyright education videos, tailor-made for the tertiary, secondary and primary education sectors, are disseminated through https://hku.to/Copyright_Classroom “The Copyright Classroom – HKU” channel as well as Ms Lee’s education website www.law.hku.hk/collab.
- Ms. Julienne Jen who won the individual Outstanding Teaching Award. Julienne received the Faculty’s Outstanding Teaching Award in 2015 and is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. Julienne is interested in exploring different methods of experiential learning in her teaching and she now practises as a solicitor, offering pro bono legal advice at the University’s Clinical Legal Education course. She has co-authored various articles and spoken in conferences concerning professional legal education and experiential learning. She is a member of the Editorial Board of the Hong Kong Lawyer magazine. In addition, she contributes regularly to the LexisNexis Practical Guidance series and the Current Service of the Halsbury’s Laws of Hong Kong.
- Team award: Professor Janny H.C. Leung (Leader) of the Faculty of Arts, Dr Marco Wan of the Faculty of Law, Dr Daniel Matthews of the Faculty of Law and Dr Anya Adair of the Faculties of Arts and Law for BA & LLB Programme Curriculum. This joint programme in Arts and Law offers an exciting double degree combining the critical and communication skills offered by a world-leading literary studies programme with comprehensive training in the law. This selective programme uniquely allows students to gain two degrees in a single five-year course of study: a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws.
- Ms. Daisy Cheung who won the Early Career Teaching Award. Daisy is the Deputy Director of the Centre for Medical Ethics & Law and currently co-teaches Medico-Legal Issues for the LLB and JD/LLM programs, as well as tort and contract law.
The Teaching Excellence Awards Scheme (TEAS) aims to recognise, reward and promote excellence in teaching at the University. Under the Scheme, there are four categories of awards, viz. University Distinguished Teaching Award, Outstanding Teaching Award (OTA), Early Career Teaching Award (ECTA) and Teaching Innovation Award (TIA). Besides individual awards, both OTA and TIA comprise team awards to recognise and encourage collaborative effort and achievement in enhancing teaching and learning. All Faculties are encouraged to nominate colleagues who have made outstanding teaching and learning contributions for these awards. For ECTA, in particular, we hope to receive at least one nomination from each Faculty. Click here to view the list of 2019 TEAS Winners.
Monday, December 16, 2019
HKU Law's SSRN Legal Studies Research Paper Series (May - Dec 2019)
Vol. 9, No. 7: December 10, 2019
Table of Contents
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty
of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Robin Veidt, University of Luxembourg - Faculty of Law,
Economics and Finance
Dirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law,
Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for
Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Ilias Bantekas, Brunel University London - Brunel Law School
Pietro Ortolani, Radboud University
Shahla F. Ali, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Manuel A. Gomez, Florida International University College of Law
Michael Polkinghorne, White & Case LLP
Johannes M M Chan, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Alex Schwartz, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Angela Huyue Zhang, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Eric C. Ip, The University of Hong Kong
Shahla F. Ali, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 9, No. 6: Oct 31, 2019
Table of Contents
Shitong Qiao, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Alex Green, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
Jennifer Hendry, School of Law, University of Leeds
Successful Secession and theValue of International Recognition
Alex Green, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
Remedial Discretion and Dilemmasin Asia
Po Jen Yap, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Successful Secession and theValue of International Recognition
Alex Green, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong
Remedial Discretion and Dilemmasin Asia
Po Jen Yap, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 9, No. 5: Oct 17, 2019
Table of Contents
Anna Dziedzic, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law, University of Melbourne - Melbourne Law School
Cheryl Saunders, University of Melbourne - Law School
Jingyi Wang, Peking University - Peking University School of Transnational Law
Wilson Chow, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Johannes M M Chan, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Po Jen Yap, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 9, No. 4: September 19, 2019
SIMON N. M. YOUNG, EDITOR
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Syren Johnstone, Department of Law, University of Hong Kong, Asian Institute of International Financial Law
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Dirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Federico Panisi, University of Brescia
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Anton Didenko, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Cyn-Young Park, Asian Development Bank
Emilija Pashoska, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance
Dirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Bo Zhao, University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Business and Economics, Asian Development Bank - Economic Research and Regional Cooperation Department (ERCD)
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Emilios Avgouleas, University of Edinburgh - School of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Dirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 9, No. 3: June 11, 2019
Table of Contents
Han Zhu, Centre for Chinese Law, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
Kelvin Hiu Fai Kwok, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Ernest Lim, National University of Singapore (NUS) - Faculty of Law
Han Zhu, Centre for Chinese Law, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law
Albert H. Y. Chen, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Kelvin Hiu Fai Kwok, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Dirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Janos Nathan Barberis, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
The Future of Data-Driven Finance and RegTech: Lessons from EU Big Bang IIDirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Rolf H. Weber, University of Zurich - Faculty of Law
A Network Theory of PatentabilityLaura G. Pedraza-Farina, Northwestern University School of Law
Ryan Whalen, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
The Age of Remix and Copyright Law ReformYahong Li, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Re-Conceptualizing ‘Object’ Analysis Under Article 101 TFEU: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives
Kelvin Hiu Fai Kwok, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
What are Law Courses for? Striking a Balance between Professional and Liberal Education GoalsDanny Gittings, University of Hong Kong, College of Humanities and Law, School of Professional and Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law
From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic RegimeDaniel Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 9, No. 2: May 10, 2019
Table of Contents
The Future of Data-Driven Finance and RegTech: Lessons from EU Big Bang IIDirk A. Zetzsche, Universite du Luxembourg - Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance, Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf - Center for Business & Corporate Law (CBC)
Douglas W. Arner, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Ross P. Buckley, University of New South Wales (UNSW) - Faculty of Law
Rolf H. Weber, University of Zurich - Faculty of Law
A Network Theory of PatentabilityLaura G. Pedraza-Farina, Northwestern University School of Law
Ryan Whalen, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
The Age of Remix and Copyright Law ReformYahong Li, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Re-Conceptualizing ‘Object’ Analysis Under Article 101 TFEU: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives
Kelvin Hiu Fai Kwok, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
What are Law Courses for? Striking a Balance between Professional and Liberal Education GoalsDanny Gittings, University of Hong Kong, College of Humanities and Law, School of Professional and Continuing Education, The University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law
From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic RegimeDaniel Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Sunday, December 8, 2019
Alistair Fraser & Daniel Matthews, Towards a Criminology of Atmospheres: Law, Affect and the Codes of the Street (Criminology & Criminal Justice)
Alistair Fraser & Daniel Matthews
First Published on September 11, 2019
Abstract: The street has a long and distinguished pedigree in criminology as a site of human sociability, transgression and spontaneity. Recent scholarship in legal studies has, however, explored the role that non-human actors play in the normative ordering of urban life. These interventions suggest the need for criminologists of the street to take seriously not only the experiential foreground of crime but also its background. In this article, we seek to bring these traditions into dialogue through engagement with the concept of ‘atmosphere’ – a place-based mood or spatialised feeling that blends human and non-human elements, and has the capacity to act in a quasi-agentic manner. Drawing on an experiment in ‘atmospheric methods’ conducted during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, in which some of the city’s central streets were occupied for 79 days, we seek to demonstrate that the analytics of ‘atmosphere’ offers a unique conceptual approach to urban life and street crime in the contemporary age.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Law and Humanities Summer School, The University of Hong Kong, 8-13 June 2020 (Applications Deadline: 6 Jan 2020)
Law and Humanities Summer School
8-13 June 2020
ABOUT
Summer school participants will take both seminar series. Participants will be sent reading materials in advance. All reading and preparation must be completed before the summer school begins.
The Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong will hold its first law and humanities summer school, 8-13 June 2020. This week-long event is open to post-graduate research students and early career academics from any discipline, based anywhere in the world, who are working at the intersection of law and the humanities. Summer school participants will take two intensive seminar series led by Alison Young, Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology at the University of Melbourne and James Martel, Professor of Political Science at San Francisco State University. In addition, there will be sessions on interdisciplinary methodologies, research and writing skills, as well as cultural and social events. This is a fantastic opportunity to work with two of the world’s leading law and humanities scholars, to develop your research and writing skills, expand your knowledge and learn from your peers in the global community of law and humanities researchers.
The seminar series
James Martel: How the law can undo what the law does
This course will consider the notion of law when it is not merely understood in its black letter, rationalist sense. The opposite of such a form of law is not necessarily chaos or nihilism but can have its own creative, contingent and positive forms. Thinking about law in this other, anarchist and decentralized sense allows us to imagine what is common to all forms of law even laws that serve to upend and contest the law as it is usually considered. In thinking about this kind of law, we will engage with a range of thinkers including Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben and Fred Moten.
Alison Young: Imagining Justice in the City
Increasing urbanization means that more and more people live and work in urban centres, and increasing urban populations present particular challenges for social organisation and urban planning, but also for law: how do we imagine a just city in times of increasing population density and social inequality? In this course, we will examine a range of ways of thinking about justice in the city, including concepts of affect, urban encounters, the precariat, ambience and atmosphere, and the lawscape, drawing on the work of Ananya Roy, Sarah Keenan, Ben Anderson, Andreas Phillippopoulos-Mihailopoulos, Guy Standing, Peter Adey and others. A range of case studies will be utilised, including debates around urban aesthetics (and how they are regulated by law); how law responds to visible precarity; and the relationship between city and citizenship.
Summer school participants will take both seminar series. Participants will be sent reading materials in advance. All reading and preparation must be completed before the summer school begins.
HOW TO APPLY
The summer school is open to post-graduate researchers and early career academics working in any discipline. Your current work should engage with law and the humanities, broadly conceived, and may include (though need not be limited to): legal, critical, cultural or political theory; law and literature; law and film; law and aesthetics; legal history; post-colonial studies; feminist legal studies; critical legal studies; critical race theory; the anthropology of law; law and geography.
Please complete the application form by clicking here
Deadline for applications: 6th January 2020
For any inquiries please contact Dr Daniel Matthews (Faculty of Law, HKU) at danmat@hku.hk.
Sunday, July 7, 2019
Daniel Matthews' From Global to Anthropocenic Assemblages: Re-Thinking Territory, Authority and Rights in the New Climatic Regime (MLR)
Modern Law Review
July 2019, Vol 82, Issue 4, pp 665-691
Abstract: In a widely read study, Saskia Sassen uses the territory, authority, rights (TAR) framework in order to analyse the transformation of social life in the West from ‘medieval’ to ‘global’ assemblages. In the context of rapid, planetary climatic change – with many claiming that we have entered a new and climatically uncertain epoch known as the Anthropocene – does the TAR framework provide the relevant conceptual resources required to understand the ‘Anthropocenic’ assemblages of the present? This article examines the limitations of Sassen’s TAR framework, arguing that alterative theoretical resources are required in order to grasp the changing dynamics of social life in the context of the new climatic regime. Click here to download the paper from SSRN.
Monday, August 20, 2018
New Book: Law, Obligation and Community (Dan Matthews and Scott Veitch)
Edited by Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch
Routledge: Taylor and Francis Group
June 2018, 272 pp.
Description: Against an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory.
Stacy Douglas & Dan Matthews on Sovereignty, Affect and Being-Bound (new book chapter)
Stacy Douglas & Daniel Matthews
in Daniel Matthews & Scott Veitch (eds), Law, Obligation, Community (Routledge, June 2018), Chapter 7, 22 pages
Introduction: If ever it left us, sovereignty has returned. The protectionist and nativist instincts that helped propel Donald Trump into office have been felt throughout the Western world as new nationalisms have forced themselves into the political mainstream. The promise of post-national identities, global flows of people and capital, and the weakening of the ‘bright lines’ of state control have been met by a forceful resistance that foregrounds local interests and concerns, often depends on ethnically defined notions of identity and clings fervently to nationalistic histories and modes of belonging. Whilst we might dismiss some of these movements as being motivated by atavistic fears of difference, there is a powerful sense that the events of 2016 represent the high watermark for the form of turbo-charged globalisation let loose as the Berlin Wall fell and the ‘new world order’ took hold in the early 1990s. As Kyle McGee argues, the West is suffering from a loss of both ‘place’ and ‘land’ as the dual forces of globalisation and global warming put extant forms of attachment to locale and community under erasure (McGee 2017). In such conditions, the allure of sovereignty with its promise to ‘take back control’, as the Brexit campaign had it, is quite understandable. If ‘waning sovereignty’ (Brown 2014) has accompanied these ‘twin vertigoes of placelessness and landlessness’ (McGee 2017, p. 128), its recent revival offers – some would believe – a line of defence against the forces of globalisation and the increasing precarity this brings. Against this background we engage with the theme of obligation in two ways.
First, we explore the ways in which juridically enforceable obligations installed and defended by modern constitutional sovereignty are crucial to giving shape to the affective life of a community. We approach sovereignty through the sentiments that it produces – or claims to produce – and the particular effect that it has in enframing the world and giving scope to a sense of our political attachments and modes of belonging. We dwell on the sensibilities associated with sovereignty and on how the mobilisation of the rights and duties associated with the protection of sovereignty affectively enframes the way a political community attaches to place, past and an imagined future.
Second, continuing our emphasis on the register of affect, we explore a sense of ‘being-bound’ that both precedes and exceeds juridically defined obligations. The binding quality of obligations – evidenced in the root word ligare, which we find in ligature, ligament, allegiance and religion – limited notion of an obligation at law. It is this more expansive sense of ‘being-bound’ that we explore in what follows, underscoring the affective, political and existential dimensions to the bonds that give form to collective life. Ultimately, we are interested in unsettling the affective life of sovereignty, in revealing and attuning our selves to a sense of ‘being-bound’ that challenges sovereignty’s power to recentre an autonomous legal subject, and its attendant national community, within an anthropocentric horizon. Such a horizon is today increasingly compromised. In particular, the ‘twin vertigoes’ of globalisation and climatic change ought to attune us to a set of relations that transcend the assumed bifurcation between human and non-human life, ushering in a sensitivity to the bonds that sustain habitability beyond the limited set of relations honoured by modern sovereignty.
We find possibilities for such an unsettling of sovereignty’s affective force in artistic practices coming out of South Africa, namely in the work of J. M. Coetzee and Nandipha Mntambo, and explore the implications of their work for rethinking what it means to ‘be-bound’ beyond the juridical proscriptions associated with sovereignty. The complex challenges associated with the constitutional settlement in South Africa is not our central concern. Rather, by attending to the practices of two artists working within this context we hope to shed light on a broader problematic. The oldest questions of legal and political theory – the nature of the body politic, the territorial limits of political power and the aspirations of the common good – are today being reposed with a renewed urgency. It is our contention that turning to art and literature helps unseat the predominant affective disposition installed by contemporary juridico-political techniques. We think that the South African case, as it has been tumultuously unfolding for the past nearly 25 years, can offer some important insights here, especially as it demonstrates how the affective force of sovereignty reaffirms a deeply held anthropocentricism that we must today begin to challenge if we are to avoid an eternal return of well-worn scripts that equate constitutional sovereignty with justice. We begin by unpacking our approach to affect before moving to discuss sovereignty, South Africa, Coetzee and Mntambo.
Monday, July 3, 2017
RGC Awards $8.5 Million in Research Grant Funding to HKU Faculty of Law
The Faculty of Law has performed exceptionally well in the 2017-2018 round of research grants awarded by the Research Grants Council (RGC). The RGC awarded more than HK$8.46 million in funding to 10 General Research Fund (GRF) projects and 3 Early Career Scheme (ECS) projects. This is more than double the amount awarded for the 2016-2017 year. The success rate for this year was 71% (GRF) and 100% (ECS) respectively. The projects tackle important issues in constitutional law, trust law, human rights law, legal education, legal history and theory, and land law. Some are inter-disciplinary. The largest grant of more than $1 million went to Professor Hualing Fu for his project on police power in transition societies including China. Congratulations to the following 13 colleagues:
- Po Jen Yap, Courts and Democracies in Asia, $736,600, GRF, 36 months
- Hualing Fu, Police Power in Transition Societies: China in Comparative Perspectives, $1,058,488, GRF, 36 months
- Rebecca Lee (Co-I: Lusina Ho), The Modern International Trust Under Siege: Legislature, Judiciary, and Theoretical Implications, $361,675, GRF, 24 months
- David Law, The Language and Ideology of Constitutions: A Computational Linguistics Analysis, $784,538, GRF, 36 months
- Lusina Ho (Co-I: Rebecca Lee), Developing Compensatory Remedies for Breaches of Trust and Fiduciary Duties, $512,198, GRF, 24 months
- Eric Ip, The Constitutional Foundations of Free Markets: Economic Provisions of the Hong Kong Basic Law in Comparative Perspective, $892,484, GRF, 36 months
- Kelley Loper, International human rights law and refugee protection in Asian states not party to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, $563,640, GRF, 24 months
- Jianlin Chen, Law, State and Emerging Natural Resources: Theoretical Perspective and Case Study of Climate Resource Management in China, $570,000, GRF, 36 months
- Richard Wu, An Empirical and Comparative Study of Law Students’ Perceptions of Their Values in Four Fastest-Growing Asian Countries: China, India, Thailand and Philippines, $844,880, GRF, 36 months
- Michael Ng, Freedom of Expression, Media Censorship and the Rule of Law in British Hong Kong (1850s-1980s), GRF, 36 months
- Daisy Cheung, Finding the Right Balance: Constructing a Theoretical Approach for the Assessment of Guardianship Systems for the Mentally Incapacitated in East Asia, ECS, $446,560, 36 months
- Dan Matthews, The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Age of the Anthropocene, $289,032, ECS, 24 months
- Shitong Qiao, National Laws and Local Land Reforms: The Spectrum of Legality, $555,400, ECS, 36 months.
Wednesday, June 14, 2017
Essays on the Hong Kong Umbrella and Taiwan Sunflower Movements (new book chapters)
2017, Routledge, 236 pp
4. "The Law and Politics of Constitutional Reform and Democratization in Hong Kong"
Albert HY Chen
Introduction: A few weeks after China’s National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) promulgated its Decision of 31 August 2014 on the model for the election by universal suffrage of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2017, the “Occupy Central” Movement – also known as the “Umbrella Movement” -- engulfed several key government and business districts in Hong Kong. As in the case of the “Sunflower” Movement in Taipei earlier in the same year, students played a very important role in the Hong Kong movement. Whereas the movement in Taipei was in protest against the ruling regime’s policy of economic cooperation with Beijing, the movement in Hong Kong was a popular protest against Beijing’s policy towards, or restrictions on, democratization in Hong Kong.
Beijing’s policy on Hong Kong’s democratization was purportedly based on the provisions of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), which was enacted by the National People’s Congress (NPC) in 1990 and came into force when Hong Kong’s status changed from that of a British colony to a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 July 1997. Ironically, so were the demands of the protestors, who alleged that the NPCSC Decision of 31 August 2014 constituted a breach of Beijing’s promise to the people of Hong Kong that the democratic election of the Chief Executive (CE) of the HKSAR by universal suffrage would be introduced – a promise enshrined in the text of the Basic Law itself. In this sense, the “Occupy” Movement in Hong Kong can be considered a social movement that drew on legal norms as an important component of its strategy of mass mobilization. How then could both the legitimacy of the NPCSC Decision of 31 August 2014 and the claims of the protestors be simultaneously based on the Basic Law – the constitutional instrument of the HKSAR? This chapter seeks to answer this question by reviewing the evolution of Hong Kong’s political system and investigating into the different understanding and interpretations of the Basic Law on the part of the Chinese regime and on the part of democracy activists in Hong Kong.
This chapter consists of the following parts, apart from this Introduction. First it examines the development of Hong Kong’s political system since colonial times, and the provisions of the Basic Law governing the political order of the HKSAR. It then briefly reviews the movements towards democratization that took place since the establishment of the HKSAR in 1997. Next it considers developments since early 2013, when the “Occupy Central” campaign was launched to struggle for the realization of “genuine universal suffrage” in the election of the CE of the HKSAR. Finally, it concludes by reflecting on the contradictions and tensions inherent in the project of “One Country, Two Systems” that were revealed by the failure of the “Occupy” Movement in realizing its democratic aspirations, particularly the conflict between the Communist Party-led socialist political system in mainland China and the aspirations towards Western-style liberal democracy on the part of democracy activists in Hong Kong.
5. "Political Protest in High-Income Societies: The Case of the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong"
5. "Political Protest in High-Income Societies: The Case of the Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong"
Introduction: Hong Kong is a metropolitan city that enjoys prosperity, freedom and the rule of law. It is also a city that recently (1997) came under China’s authoritarian rule. The tension in Hong Kong’s political system is manifested in the continued struggle to reconcile with its new political master and the corresponding demand for democratic advancement. As a “semi-democracy”, Hong Kong is constitutionally committed to universal suffrage, and there is a deeply felt passion and aspiration among residents in the city for liberal constitutional democracy. But the commitment to democracy is ironically made by a Communist Party authoritarian state that is fearful of, if not hostile to, the very concept. The fight for democracy in the sub-national unit within an authoritarian regime has defined and continues to define Hong Kong’s political landscape.
Hong Kong has been a difficult place for China to govern. Its political freedom and openness, independent and powerful legal system, and vibrant and challenging civil society are alien to the Central Authorities in Beijing. For them, Hong Kong remains uncharted water in many fundamental aspects. Yet as difficult and costly as it has been, China has grown confident in its ability to govern Hong Kong with a degree of effectiveness, and increasingly has resorted to constitutional rules and legal process in shaping Hong Kong’s political future. The Decision of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee on 31 August 2014, as discussed below, is the most recent example of how China suffocates Hong Kong’s democratic impulses through legal interpretation. But China’s rule of law concept is an authoritarian one. Will it prove effective in deflecting and silencing resistance from political and legal institutions in Hong Kong and in limiting Hong Kong’s constitutional options?
Deeply concerned with a real decline in Hong Kong’s way of life, frustrated by the authoritarian rule of law that the Central Authorities impose on Hong Kong, and desperate for the lack of democratic mandate that may entrench Hong Kong’s value and institutions, various groups in the city decided to make their political demands outside the established political and legal routes, launching the largest civil disobedience movement to date by occupying main streets at the heart of the city to protest against the 31 August Decision (the movement was referred to as the Occupying Central Movement, hereafter OCM). In doing so, Hong Kong residents took the constitution into their hands, insisting on their own alternative constitutional interpretation.
While the pursuit of democratic value through civic participation and the rule of law are both close to the heart of the Hong Kong people, the OCM, as the largest civil disobedience movement to date, reveals a rare moment of a clear tension between the ideals of democracy and the rule of law. The OCM clearly demonstrated Hong Kong’s democratic passion and resilience. For a brief period, the movement gathered so much momentum that the students appeared to be unstoppable. However, with the prolonged nature of the OCM, the movement started to show its adverse social and economic impact, leading to a split in the community which initially showed a high degree of support and solidarity. The democratic potential of civil disobedience for the OCM began to decline and diminish, and its potential instability started to come to the forefront. As time progressed, the OCM was associated more with frustration, fatigue and disorder, and even became linked with political conspiracy and a continued threat to Hong Kong’s rule of law. When pro-OCT activists struggled to cope with internal conflicts, anti-OCM forces were mobilized and brought the occupiers to courts to account. Ironically, it was a court order that drove a fatal wedge into the OCM, dividing the supporter community and undermining the moral of the occupiers. It was the authority of the court and the willingness of the people in the city to obey the rule of law that effectively suppressed citizens’ democratic impulses.
With the peaceful ending of the OCM, Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy has turned a new page. The two-and-a-half month display of mass civil disobedience was unprecedented in its scale, epic in its manifestation, and potentially lasting in its impact on Hong Kong’s constitutional development; but it was also highly controversial and divisive. There was the expectation that when all the dust settles, Hong Kong will have to do some serious soul-searching to rediscover its core values, redefine its identity, and locate itself within China. Unfortunately, the OCM has not brought political antagonism to an end. The OCM is much a reflection of divisive society as a catalyzer of a more radical movement, one that may spin Hong Kong out of control.
6. "The Nomos of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement"
Abstract: My claim here is that the great success of Hong Kong's pro-democracy "Umbrella Movement" was that it temporarily ruptured the background ordering of the city that we – as legal scholars – so often take for granted. This interruption of the existing normative order or nomos of the city re-posed the questions belonging and by paying due attention to the interruption that the movement enacted we can see its enduring significance for Hong Kong’s legal and political settlement. The argument proceeds by first setting out the shift that I propose to take: away from “law” and towards the “nomos”, a term that, as will become clear, opens our thinking to a broader and more dynamic sense of normative ordering than that afforded by a strictly legalistic lens. I then turn to two distinct senses of the “nomos” that I will discuss in relation to the Umbrella Movement. The first, inspired by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, foregrounds the normative force of spatial ordering and the second, inspired by sociologist Peter Berger and the legal theorist and historian Robert Cover, assesses the discursive dimension to normativity, stressing how shared normative commitments are central to the formation of community and a common identity. My claim is that, beyond raising technical, constitutional issues concerning voting rights, the Umbrella Movement’s interruption of the city’s existing spatio-normative distribution posed fundamental questions about the nature of identity and belonging in the territory that goes to the heart of its political significance.
Thursday, February 23, 2017
New Issues: SSRN Legal Studies Research Paper Series (HKU)
Vol. 6, No. 6: 23 December 2016
Table of Contents
1.A Principles-Based Response to the Proposed Reform of the Governance Structure for Listing Regulation in Hong Kong
Syren Johnstone, Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong, Asian Institute of International Financial Law
Nigel Davis, University of Hong Kong
Douglas W. Arner, University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
2. The Limits of Critique and the Forces of Law
Daniel Charles Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Scott Veitch, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
3. Plasticity, Jurisdiction and the Interruption of Sovereignty: A Response to Catherine Malabou Via José Saramago's Seeing
Daniel Charles Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
4. Narrative, Space and Atmosphere: A Nomospheric Inquiry into Hong Kong's Pro-Democracy 'Umbrella Movement'
Daniel Charles Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
5. The Nomos of Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement
Daniel Charles Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
6. A Spirit of the Common: Re-Imagining 'The Common Law' with Jean-Luc Nancy
Daniel Charles Matthews, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
Vol. 7, No. 1: 17 February 2017
Table of Contents
1. 'All for Some' or 'Some for All'? Assessing the Realisation of the Right to Social Welfare in the Retirement Protection Reform in Hong Kong
Karen Kong, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
2. Legal Origin and Corporate Governance for Chinese Family Business: Evidence in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China
Hugo Ho-Ting Chu, The University of Hong Kong - Asian Institute of International Financial Law, The University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law, University College Dublin (UCD) - Michael Smurfit Graduate School of Business, Hong Kong Polytechnic University - Department of Applied Social Sciences
3. The Emergence of Transnational Environmental Law in the Anthropocene
Jolene Lin, University of Hong Kong - Faculty of Law
4. Towards Peer Presence in Post Disaster Governance: An Empirical Study
Shahla F. Ali, Deputy Director, Program in Arbitration & Dispute Resolution, University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law
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