Consumer Product Safety Regulation – Recalls and Accident Information Disclosure Mechanisms

[The following is an un-footnoted longer draft of one of two Policy Digests prepared for a Sydney Southeast Asia Centre joint research project and an ASEAN Secretariat conference on consumer protection law in Hanoi over 8-9 December 2014. The footnoted final version is available at: http://www.asean.org/resources/publications/item/consumer-protection-digests-and-case-studies-a-policy-guide-volume-1?category_id=382]
1. Overview
Consumer product safety is a major contemporary concern for developing, middle-income and developed economies. ASEAN, through its Committee on Consumer Protection (ACCP), has recognised this as a priority topic for international collaboration, as trade in goods accelerates through the region with its major trading partners world-wide. Part 2 of this Digest highlights the policy challenge. Part 3 shows how market and even private law incentives are unlikely to provide sufficient incentives for manufacturers to produce safe products; some minimum regulatory standards are needed. Part 4 focuses on regulatory powers to force recalls of unsafe goods, but also requirements for suppliers to notify national regulators about ‘voluntary’ recalls. It also outlines recall information disclosure efforts underway nationally, regionally (notably within the European Union, EU, but also through ACCP since early 2011), and now internationally (especially through the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD, since late 2012). This Digest suggests there is scope already for greater engagement by ACCP and individual ASEAN member states particularly with the OECD initiative in this field. Part 5 also urges broader information-sharing as the OECD clearing-house expands over the next few years, as well as with product safety incident reporting systems already developed particularly in the EU and the United States (US).

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International Commercial Arbitration: An Asia-Pacific Perspective (2nd ed)

The first edition of this excellent textbook, reviewed here and written by Simon Greenberg, Christopher Kee and J Romesh Weeramantry, is forthcoming next year in a second edition that will include extra detailed comparisons from Asia-Pacific jurisdictions based on reports prepared by local experts. The second edition will be an even more valuable resource for practitioners and researchers in international commercial and treaty arbitration, given that so many countries in the region have adopted (and sometimes adapted) core international instruments like the New York Convention and UNCITRAL Model Law, including both Australia and Japan,
My former student Jim Morrison, now Senior Associate at Allens Linklaters in Sydney, has prepared with me a detailed (100+ page) report on Australia as the basis for our contribution to the second edition: available via http://ssrn.com/abstract=2514124. The report focuses on the most topical issues from a comparative perspective (as identified by those three commentators), raised in each of the 10 chapters of the Greenberg et al volume. However, the paper also provides an overview of the key provisions found in Australia’s (Model Law based) International Arbitration Act and main arbitration rules, with a particular emphasis on case law developments (including brief case notes) since statutory amendments in 2010. In addition, the paper includes a guide to other major publications related to international arbitration in Australia, especially since 2010. As mentioned in that paper, a more complete listing is provided below on this Blog (thanks to another former student, Ganesh Vaheisvaran). This should be a useful resource not only for those interested in Australia but also other Model Law based jurisdictions in the region, including Japan.

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Consumer Protection and Free Trade [and Investment] Agreements

My public lecture on this topic, bringing together two research fields of contemporary public interest, was presented on 24 September 2014 as part of Sydney Law School’s Distinguished Speakers Program.
The session was kindly introduced by my colleague Prof Chester Brown, and ended with a commentary by NUS Asst Prof Jean Ho who kindly arrived straight from Sydney airport after her flight from Singapore.
The audio file of my presentation and Chester’s introduction are available via Sydney Law School’s podcast channel (specifically here), my Powerpoint slides are here (as a PDF), and a related short paper is here. Below is the abstract (with further hyperlinked references available here) and speaker/commentator bios.

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Who Rules Japan? Popular Participation in the Japanese Legal Process

Below is the manuscript version of our Preface to Leon Wolff, Luke Nottage and Kent Anderson (eds) Who Rules Japan? Popular Participation in the Japanese Legal Process (forthcoming in April 2015 from Edward Elgar), comprising:
1. Introduction: Who Rules Japan?
Leon Wolff, Luke Nottage and Kent Anderson
2. Judging Japan’s New Criminal Trials: Early Returns from 2009
David T. Johnson and Satoru Shinomiya
3. Popular Participation in Labour Law: The New Labour Dispute Resolution Tribunal
Takashi Araki and Leon Wolff
4. In Defence of Japan: Government Lawyers and Judicial System Reforms
Stephen Green & Luke Nottage
5. Administering Welfare in an Ageing Society
Trevor Ryan
6. Reforming Japanese Corrections: Catalysts and Conundrums
Carol Lawson
7. Competition Law in Japan: The Rise of Private Enforcement by Litigious Reformers
Souichirou Kozuka
8. When Japanese Law Goes Pop
Leon Wolff

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