Eric C. Ip

The University of Hong Kong | HKU · Faculty of Law

This paper brings a constitutional economics perspective to bear on the World Health Organization (WHO), the flagship United Nations intergovernmental health organisation, which is obligated by its Constitution to achieve ‘the highest possible level of health’ for the world's peoples. The WHO has in the seven decades of its existence used its formi...

COVID-19 has brought the world grinding to a halt. As of early August 2020, the greatest public health emergency of the century thus far has registered almost 20 million infected people and claimed over 730,000 lives across all inhabited continents, bringing public health systems to their knees, and causing shutdowns of borders and lockdowns of cit...

The Basic Healthcare and Health Promotion Law 2019 became the new constitution of China’s health system in June 2020, giving legal effect to ambitious health reform programmes like Healthy China 2030. The concurrent outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 must not distract us from appreciating the fact that this Law will comprehensively overhaul the h...

The health of the planet and its life forms are under threat from anthropogenic climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss, and the extreme weather events, heatwaves and wildfires that accompany them. The burgeoning field of planetary health studies the interplay between humanity and the Earth's biosphere and ecosystems on which human health d...

Humans and other species depend on the planet’s well-being to survive and flourish. The health of the planet and its ecosystems is under threat from anthropogenic climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss. The promotion of planetary health against entrenched degradation of nature urgently requires ethical guidance. Using an ecocentric virtue...

Background In its 2015 decision in Montgomery v. Lanarkshire Health Board, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom overruled the long-standing, paternalistic prudent doctor standard of care in favour of a new reasonable patient standard which obligates doctors to make their patients aware of all material risks of the recommended treatment and of an...

This book provides an accessible introduction to the emerging field of behavioral public choice economics and the law. This field studies how public officials, lawmakers, and judges fall prey to their own biases and heuristics, and how constitutions and judicial doctrines can be structured to mitigate these cognitive shortcomings. Written lucidly i...

There are sound behavioral justifications for widely respected constitutional principles such as separation of powers, bicameralism, and free speech, as they enable boundedly rational actors with bounded willpower and bounded self-interest to offset each other’s systemic and potentially catastrophic cognitive biases. However, it would be naïve to t...

Behavioral public choice economics is the synthesis of two revolutions: first, the breakthrough of public choice economics that voting and the market are not two isolated universes, but merely two modes of decisionmaking by the same human actors that should be brought within a single framework of analysis; and second, the watershed rejection by beh...

Due recognition of the cognitive shortcomings of judges is indispensable to any serious account of judicial behavior. This chapter investigated how the common law could have emerged efficient, incrementally, and without centralized guidance, in spite of the biases and heuristics of judges and litigants. It demonstrates that the system of precedent...

The typical democracy is a hotbed of cognitive biases. The electorate’s self-serving bias is bound to be magnified by democratic institutions. There is a compelling need for a behavioral public choice economics to highlight the myriad ways biased lawmakers and citizens interact, and hopefully to reinforce the healthy skepticism found in the public...

Conventional behavioral economists who campaigned for policy initiatives that nudge boundedly rational citizens toward rational choices tend to ignore the well-documented public choice insights that public officials routinely fall prey to pressures from special interests. Behavioral public choice theorists add that policy-makers fall prey to their...

Thoroughly rewritten and updated, the fourth edition of Law and Justice in Hong Kong continues to offer readers a comprehensive account of the legal system of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China—the only common law jurisdiction in East Asia. Featuring discussions of the latest case law, the COVID-19 pandem...

Contemporary ethical reflections on responses to public health crises center on the deontological, utilitarian, and principlist traditions, but not the more ancient tradition of natural law. Yet, as an alternative to the usual framing of public health moral dilemmas as a conflict between individual liberty and collective interests, or trade-offs in...

International comparisons of the effectiveness of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) based on national case and mortality data are fraught with underestimated complexity. This article calls for stronger attention to just how extensive is the multifactorial nature of national case and mortality data, and argu...

The core animating feature of administrative justice scholarship is the desire to understand how justice is achieved through the delivery of public services and the actions, inactions, and decision-making of administrative bodies. The study of administrative justice also encompasses the redress systems by which people can challenge administrative b...

The core animating feature of administrative justice scholarship is the desire to understand how justice is achieved through the delivery of public services and the actions, inactions, and decision-making of administrative bodies. The study of administrative justice also encompasses the redress systems by which people can challenge administrative b...

This article contributes to philosophical reflections on public health law by drawing on virtue jurisprudence, which rests on the straightforward observation that a political community and its laws will inevitably shape the character of its officials and subjects, and that an excellent character is indispensable to fulfilment. Thus, the law is prop...

Hong Kong and Macau are cosmopolitan former Western European dependencies in East Asia that became autonomous Special Administrative Regions of the People’s Republic of China toward the end of the twentieth century. The Basic Law and the Lei Básica, Hong Kong’s and Macau’s contemporary constitutional charters, were designed to serve as jurisdiction...

In this volume, distinguished experts, and leaders in the field, discuss a wide range of issues in administrative law from a comparative perspective. Administrative law is concerned with the conferral, nature, exercise, and legal control of administrative (or ‘executive’) governmental power. It has close links with other areas of ‘public law’, nota...

States all over the world have reacted to COVID-19 with quarantines of entire cities, provinces, and even nations. Previous studies and preliminary evidence from current lockdowns suggest that emergency measures protecting the public’s physical health by dislocating individuals, families, and social networks could well be causing a devastating publ...

The continuing outbreak of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 has inflicted considerable burdens onto the health system of China, the world's most populous country. Remarkably, among spectrum of potential mitigation strategies, the Chinese government has implemented all-out lockdowns on large geograph...

Examines the public health emergency regulations passed by Hong Kong in response to the COVID-19 pandemic under the Prevention and Control of Disease Ordinance s.8. Details the scope of the powers, their key features, such as a compulsory quarantine period for new arrivals, and the context in which they were made. Reviews the constitutional princip...

Awareness of and investment in global mental health security is urgently needed amid the COVID-19 pandemic and impending economic recession in anticipation of a coming global mental health crisis.

The promulgation of the Judicial Insolvency Network (JIN) Guidelines by the Supreme Court of Singapore in 2017 has triggered innovative cross-border insolvency developments in the Asia-Pacific. It is intriguing that the Guidelines were conceived not by Singaporean judges alone, but jointly with a transnational network of bankruptcy judges. This art...

Discusses the invocation of emergency powers in Hong Kong under the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region 1997 art.18(4) to combat civil unrest, and examines the constitutional and legal limits regarding their application, including the duty of Hong Kong courts to disapply Chinese national laws that contravene the Basic Law. Cons...

A parcel of land in the heart of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has been ceded to mainland China in all but name under the Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Hong Kong Express Rail Link (Co-location) Ordinance (Cap.632), becoming the first mainland enclave, known as the "Mainland Port Area," inside Hong Kong in which the full force of socialist crimin...

Extensively rewritten and revised, the third edition of Law and Justice in Hong Kong continues to offer readers a comprehensive account of the legal system of Hong Kong — the only common law jurisdiction in East Asia. Fully updated, it encourages readers to appreciate the underlying values of legal practice and the administration of justice in the...

The rise of the regulatory state, compounded by political polarization, in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China has opened up opportunities for its common law courts to substantively review the lawfulness of an array of governmental actions. Through the development of doctrines on reasonableness review and s...

This is the first book that focuses on the entrenched, fundamental divergence between the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal and Macau's Tribunal de Última Instância over their constitutional jurisprudence, with the former repeatedly invalidating unconstitutional legislation with finality and the latter having never challenged the constitutionality of...

This article will explore whether the law should allow people with anorexia nervosa to refuse nutrition and hydration with special reference to the English decision in Re E (Medical Treatment: Anorexia). It argues that the judge in that case made the correct decision in holding that the patient, who suffered from severe anorexia nervosa, lacked cap...

This article addresses the scholarly gap in the ethics of epidemiology by exploring what virtue ethics, one of the oldest ethical traditions in moral philosophy, has to say about 'the virtuous epidemiologist'. It expounds comparatively the content and merits of a virtue ethics approach against more popular contemporary schools of thought such as co...

This article studies the rise of judicial review of local administrative monopolies in contemporary China. Anticompetitive abuses of power by local party-states, driven by corruption, have shaken the very foundations of the country’s administrative unity and market efficiency. The entrenched skepticism of the authoritarian party-state toward legal...

Behavioral economics has revolutionized American legal scholarship in many areas of law, but not in administrative law, the law that regulates the regulators. This article theorizes that the administrative law doctrines developed by the Supreme Court of the United States strikingly resemble a system of ‘debiasing’ devices developed to counteract bu...

The increasing importance of subnational governments in interstate affairs calls for international and comparative law scholars to take subnational foreign relations law more seriously. This article conceives this law as the legal rules that regulate the vertical allocation of foreign relations powers within and across States, and constructs an ana...

This new edition of Law and Justice in Hong Kong continues to offer readers a comprehensive account of the legal system of Hong Kong – the only common law jurisdiction in East Asia. Fully updated and revised, it encourages readers to appreciate the underlying values of legal practice and the administration of justice in the context of wider global...

The protracted constitutional conflicts between the Chinese state and Hong Kong society over the pace and form of democratization have become a source of political instability. This article sheds new light on these dynamics by analyzing the two sides as locked in a coordination dilemma: both have important common interests to coordinate with each o...

This article studies how the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal has come to develop a sophisticated judicial gloss on the provisions of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitutional document, in ways unforeseen by the Chinese National People’s Congress that enacted it. The ascendancy of constitutional common law in Hong Kong after the end of British rule...

This Article argues that the socialist legal system did not die in the late 1980s. Instead, the statist parts of the socialist legal system—drawn from Leninist ideology and the Russian legal tradition—have strongly influenced the law in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s. In fact, these Russo-Leninist transplants from the socialis...

Recurrent proposals to establish a constitutional supervisory committee have been pertinaciously rejected in spite of widespread recognition of the Chinese Constitution’s ineffectiveness. And yet, the Hong Kong Basic Law Committee has long epitomized in practice a prototypic form of constitutional supervision. Vested with quasi-judicial competences...

The constitutional foundations of economic liberty in Hong Kong, the freest economy in the world according to many, are little understood. So as the perceived spread of collusion, cronyism, and corruption in the territory ever since the 1997 transfer of sovereignty despite China’s promises that little change will be made to the pre-existing way of...

Legislative supremacy, parliamentary accountability, and parliamentary privilege are the cornerstones of the lex et consuetudo parliamenti (law and custom of Parliament) in the United Kingdom. This article systematically examines, from the standpoint of comparative constitutional law, how a variant of this mainstay of British constitutionalism cont...

Law and Justice in Hong Kong offers readers an accessible and updated account of the legal system of Hong Kong, the only common law jurisdiction in East Asia. Written in a lucid narrative style, it encourages readers to appreciate the underlying values of legal practice and the administration of justice in the context of wider global and regional d...

This article undertakes the heretofore untried task of documenting and explaining the antithetical case law of the American and UK Supreme Courts as to substantive review of administrative discretion over the past three decades. Despite sharing common legal origins and experiencing comparable aggrandisements of administrative power in the latter ha...

Constitutional judicial review has often been described as “countermajoritarian” and antidemocratic. Recent empirical findings, however, suggest that reviewing courts in some authoritarian states have in fact adopted policies more to the liking of the disenfranchised majority than the unelected ruling elite. This article addresses this gap by propo...

Popular constitutionalism rarely arises in authoritarian polities. In the absence of genuine elections and referenda, aggrieved and disenfranchised citizens are more likely to resort to extraconstitutional action to defend themselves, to which the regime may respond with decisive suppression. Systemic popular constitutionalism did emerge in Hong Ko...

It would be easy to overstate the expansive impact of the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal's controversial decision in Kong Yunming v Director of Social Welfare on the right to social welfare, its effects in removing a signifi cant obstacle for new immigrants seeking social security payments notwithstanding. The new test that the Court deployed for...

English administrative law guards judicial supremacy over all matters of statutory interpretation, while instructing judges to refrain from scrutinizing administrators' factual findings. By contrast, American federal courts are obliged to respect agencies' statutory-interpretive autonomy, but take a rigorous " hard look " at substantial agency fact...

The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 erected an institutional ‘firewall’ designed to substantially insulate the courts of the United Kingdom from undue political interference. Nevertheless, the new Supreme Court, its enhanced independence in recruitment and decision-making under the Act notwithstanding, have above all insisted on maintaining a defere...

Demystifying the Hermit Kingdom: the constitution and public administration in North Korea Background: Situations of extreme information deficit regarding administrative behavior are rare, but such conditions persist for the most enigmatic and troubling nations,such as North Korea. How might the behavior of public administrators be explained when s...

Background Situations of extreme information deficit regarding administrative behavior are rare, but such conditions persist for the most enigmatic and troubling nations, such as North Korea. How might the behavior of public administrators be explained when systematic observation of individual administrators or institutions’ parties is not feasible...

Under what conditions will two subnational supreme courts diverge fundamentally in their understandings of and approaches toward, constitutional adjudication, in spite of being invested with identical jurisdictions and overseen by a shared sovereign, within roughly the same time frame? China's two autonomous Special Administrative Regions (SARs), H...

The competition between the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal, a cosmopolitan common law supreme court, and the Chinese National People's Congress Standing Committee, a Leninist parliamentary body, over the “proper meaning” of the Hong Kong Basic Law constituted a very important facet of the territory's constitutional history since the end of British...

In contemporary Hong Kong, China’s first special administrative region, administrative law has become ever more influential over government decision-making, notwithstanding the semi-authoritarian political framework of the territory. Contrary to existing scholarship, this Article argues that neither rule-of-law concerns nor misguided judicial adven...

This article uses a Positive Political Economy approach to understand the development of judicial review of agency decisions in China, where formal legal institutions are often supposed irrelevant to administrative governance. This article demonstrates that, although the National People’s Congress has tried to limit the competence of courts to exer...

This article examines the evolution of the rules that govern central-local government relations in the Chinese political economy. Although the federalism that accompanied China’s market reforms has substantially facilitated economic growth, it has also created powerful incentives for local authorities to abuse their powers, significantly increasing...

The consensus over independent constitutional judicial review – that it inevitably stems from electoral and inter-branch competition – has been weakened by recent empirical discoveries; however, empiricists have yet to offer a coherent explanation why non-competitive, authoritarian, governments would tolerate constitutional courts that strike d...

Globalization is transforming the contemporary international system. Two major developments have arisen at the expense of the law of the sovereign state. First, specialized regimes of public international law have proliferated into areas previously monopolized by the state, such as human rights, environmental law, and trade law. Second, rules enact...

The Human Rights Act 1998 unprecedentedly enabled the senior courts in the United Kingdom to review parliamentary enactments for compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights. This article seeks to analyze within the framework of public choice economics two phenomena arising from this development that are counterintuitive: What made Pa...

Being one of the most eminent schools of jurisprudence in Eastern Philosophy, Classical Chi-nese Legalism has a lot to offer to the understanding of the underlying forces which shaped East Asian legal systems even to the present day. I will comprehensively reconstruct the Legalist idea of law in three dimensions, (1) law and society, (2) law and po...

International legal scholarship has for so long taken the "Classical Question" of whether international law is true law or not as the starting point of inquiry. In this paper, I will demonstrate that this is a loophole which will lead observers to ignore many other important dimensions of international law. Given that the label "law" does not carry...

Sun Yat-sen was one of the earliest and most influential political thinkers in East Asia who advocated constitutional democracy. How different was his model from its Western counterparts? Most of Sun�s constitutional thought was built on blocks of ancient Chinese political philosophy, which might not be easy for outsiders to understand. Although hi...

Judicial corruption poses serious threats to good national governance in the PRC as it renders courts irresponsive to the country's growingly complex society and undermines the legitimacy of the law and government. Most sources of judicial corruption lie outside of the courts, and they can hardly be eliminated without administrative and political r...