Sustainable investing in Asia presents unique challenges and opportunities for ESG-oriented funds. In our paper ‘Contextualising ESG Funds’ Engagement Strategies in Asia’, forthcoming in the Journal of Business Law, we analyse how ESG funds navigate Asia’s distinctive business landscape to advance sustainability objectives.
My chapter is one of a collection of selected essays published by Routledge in Fundamental Rights, Religion and Human Dignity: A Constitutional Journey (edited by Javier Martínez-Torrón and myself) which have their origins in papers presented at the Sixth Conference convened by the International Consortium for Law and Religious Studies (ICLARS), which took place in Cordoba, Spain in September 2022. The conference theme was ‘Human Dignity, Law and Religious Diversity: Designing the Future of Inter-Cultural Societies’.
Our open-access co-edited book was published last year by Springer in their interdisciplinary Asia in Transition series, launched by the Attorney-Gerneral of Brunei and later the former Chief Justice of Western Australia. Despite many new legal instruments created to combat corruption, it remains serious across most parts of Asia, as outlined in the editors’ introduction and detailed across nine jurisdiction-specific chapters. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, emergency measures for government procurement and economic management expanded opportunities for corruption and impacted enforcement activities. Overall corruption has persisted despite new national and international law instruments, and issues related to bribery and other serious illegal behaviour by foreign investors continue to emerge across Asia.
The England and Wales Mental Capacity Act 2005 and the Singapore Mental Capacity Act 2008 appear to be twins on paper, sharing the same core principles, the same definition of incapacity, and near-identical best interests checklists for making decisions for people who lack capacity (‘Ps’). Yet they have gone on to live very different lives, as seen in distinct bodies of case law, divergent judicial interpretations, and legislative intentions which have emphasised different themes. My co-authored article ‘The Two Lives of the Mental Capacity Act: Rethinking East-West Binaries in Comparative Analysis’ published in the Medical Law Review explains these differences, similarities, socio-cultural underpinnings, and opportunities for bi-directional learning. My collaborators for this interdisciplinary project were legal philosopher Dr Camillia Kong (School of Law, Queen Mary University of London) and bioethicist Associate Professor Michael Dunn (NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine).
What methodological implications should follow if we are to adopt a truly pluralist institutional approach to studying constitutional interpretation? This is the question we sought to address in our award-winning article ‘What would a pluralist institutional approach to constitutional interpretation look like? Some methodological implications’ published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I-CON). In this article, we first advanced the argument that there is a need to take on a broader pluralist perspective when studying constitutional interpretation.