Politics, Ideology, and Legal System Reform in Northeast Asia

Legal systems throughout East Asia are in the midst of rapid and potentially fundamental change, across a range of legal fields. This paper, prepared for a conference on the potential effects of 9/11 on legal and social change in East Asia, examines East Asian legal reforms in the areas of administrative law and corporate law. These two fields, though not often studied in tandem, both respond to a pair of competing sentiments, one which can be thought of as "neo-liberal," and the other which might be termed populist/progressive. These competing sentiments are at play as East Asian legal reforms unfold, and it is as yet unclear which of them will be more fully served once the reforms take hold in society. Complicating the picture are the effects of 9/11 on America's foreign policy, as well as the effects of the "Enron" crisis in American corporate governance, both of which have shifted America's focus on East Asian law reform from where it stood at the end of the 1990s.