Ching-Fu Lin’s research while affiliated with National Tsing Hua University and other places

This open access book is the first of its kind to address a question of both theoretical and practical significance: how do countries or entities approach economic cooperation in the face of vexing political concerns and overlapping sovereignty claims? Built upon three contemporary case studies on North-South Korea, China-Taiwan, and North-South Cyprus – representative pairs of ‘divided nations’, broadly defined – the book explores from both an empirical and a conceptual perspective the underlying factors, approaches and patterns that influence the economic relationship between the two sides. The book examines complex dynamics and identifies critical factors across the case studies, making a timely contribution to debates surrounding sovereignty, democracy and legitimacy in the context of international economic laws given the shifting geopolitical landscape. It further informs countries that do not share the same features of divided nations but nonetheless experience diplomatic crises or military conflicts, which render their economic cooperation sensitive and strenuous. This book is a must-read for researchers, trade lawyers, and students in international law and international relations. It also serves as a valuable asset for negotiators, diplomats and policymakers, providing crucial insights for making decisions that can either escalate or de-escalate geopolitical conflicts. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Academia Sinica Thematic Program.

Over the last few decades, advances in transportation and production technology, in conjunction with economic globalization and the emergence of multinational corporations, have consolidated fragmented production processes into long and complex supply chains across jurisdictions. While there are benefits to such global supply chains (“GSCs”), the prevalence of human rights violations attributable to information asymmetry, as well as rule of law gaps between different jurisdictions, has been a constant challenge. Modern slavery, child abuse, harsh working conditions, low wages, and other problems have reoccurred in the factories of upstream suppliers in the global South and have been systemically ignored by buyers in the global North. As such, how to alleviate human rights abuses along GSCs is indeed a daunting problem. Today, various public, private, and hybrid approaches have been designed and implemented at different levels by different actors to address GSC human rights challenges, such as the United Nations’ Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (“UNGPs”), the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (“OECD”) Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises, the United Kingdom’s Modern Slavery Act, the United States’ Dodd-Frank Act, the Responsible Business Alliance Codes of Conduct, and the Social Accountability 8000 International Standard. However, these public, private, and hybrid governance mechanisms have grown more ineffective and inefficient due to—again—information asymmetry, and rule of law gaps. A stronger approach that is premised upon transparency and traceability in the GSC is urgently needed. To fill these gaps, the recent emergence of distributed ledger technologies (commonly referred to as blockchain) may offer a promising disintermediation step toward a “technological fix” to GSCs’ human rights challenges. To assess such a possibility from both a theoretical and a practical perspective, we first examine in Section II the characteristics, benefits, and cross-border spillover effects of GSCs, as well as human rights violations by multinational corporations and their power and responsibilities. Section III illuminates the ineffectiveness of existing governance models and regulatory measures, at both the international and national levels, and identifies information asymmetry and rule of law gaps as fundamental flaws. This finding leads us to examine the extent to which blockchain can serve as a governance tool along GSCs. Section IV discusses how the key features of blockchain—transparency, traceability, data consistency and security, authenticity, and completeness—can alleviate problems of information asymmetry, rule of law gaps, and corporate compliance along GSCs, further helping to ameliorate transnational human rights issues. Nevertheless, while “blockchainizing” GSCs seems to have the potential to overcome challenges of public and private governance, some normative and technical limits and risks remain to be addressed, such as adequate infrastructural support, scalability, cybersecurity, and the “garbage in, garbage out” conundrum.

Big data and algorithmic risk prediction tools promise to improve criminal justice systems by reducing human biases and inconsistencies in decision‐making. Yet different, equally justifiable choices when developing, testing and deploying these socio‐technical tools can lead to disparate predicted risk scores for the same individual. Synthesising diverse perspectives from machine learning, statistics, sociology, criminology, law, philosophy and economics, we conceptualise this phenomenon as predictive inconsistency. We describe sources of predictive inconsistency at different stages of algorithmic risk assessment tool development and deployment and consider how future technological developments may amplify predictive inconsistency. We argue, however, that in a diverse and pluralistic society we should not expect to completely eliminate predictive inconsistency. Instead, to bolster the legal, political and scientific legitimacy of algorithmic risk prediction tools, we propose identifying and documenting relevant and reasonable ‘forking paths’ to enable quantifiable, reproducible multiverse and specification curve analyses of predictive inconsistency at the individual level.

Pioneered by the US, recent mega-regional trade agreements such as the CPTPP have incorporated ‘regulatory coherence’ provisions—mirroring the US Administrative Procedural Act's core designs—to balance between domestic regulatory autonomy and international cooperation. Building upon existing literature that traces the trajectories of the diffusion of regulatory coherence across jurisdictions, this article analyses how Australia's constitutional tradition could effectively condition the development of regulatory coherence in a Westminster-based model of governance. It is argued that the global entrenchment of regulatory coherence is contingent upon the inherent boundary defined by the political dynamics and constitutional structures within a jurisdiction.

The interface between science and law has been much debated in various fields of international law and the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been one of the main forums. Notably, WTO disputes, such as EC – Hormones and EC – Biotech, have drawn controversies and criticisms over the role of science in WTO law. Korea – Radionuclides – also known as the Fukushima case – calls upon us to reconsider an under-analysed perspective regarding science and law. While the Fukushima accident marked the first massive radionuclide release into the ocean with significant uncertainties and complexities, Korea – Radionuclides did not touch upon any ‘science-based’ obligations under the Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS Agreement). Thus, it stands out as a unique dispute in the 25 years of the SPS case law. This article unpacks Korea – Radionuclides, challenging and rethinking the assumed dichotomy between science-based and non-science-based obligations under the SPS Agreement. Our critical examination of Korea – Radionuclides suggests that science plays an important role even in the discussions of non-science-based obligations. In contrast to the conventional wisdom of the science/non-science dichotomy, we further argue that the normative integrity and raison d’être of the SPS Agreement in fact rest upon the inextricable nexus and integration between science-based and non-science-based obligations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics. Enabled by the exponential increase of data that is collected, transmitted, and processed transnationally, these changes have important implications for international economic law (IEL). This volume examines the dynamic interplay between AI and IEL by addressing an array of critical new questions, including: How to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze AI for purposes of IEL? How is AI affecting established concepts and rubrics of IEL? Is there a need to reconfigure IEL, and if so, how? Contributors also respond to other cross-cutting issues, including digital inequality, data protection, algorithms and ethics, the regulation of AI-use cases (autonomous vehicles), and systemic shifts in e-commerce (digital trade) and industrial production (fourth industrial revolution). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are transforming economies, societies, and geopolitics. Enabled by the exponential increase of data that is collected, transmitted, and processed transnationally, these changes have important implications for international economic law (IEL). This volume examines the dynamic interplay between AI and IEL by addressing an array of critical new questions, including: How to conceptualize, categorize, and analyze AI for purposes of IEL? How is AI affecting established concepts and rubrics of IEL? Is there a need to reconfigure IEL, and if so, how? Contributors also respond to other cross-cutting issues, including digital inequality, data protection, algorithms and ethics, the regulation of AI-use cases (autonomous vehicles), and systemic shifts in e-commerce (digital trade) and industrial production (fourth industrial revolution). This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.