“Consumer Law and Policy in Australia and New Zealand” – and Beyond

As emphasised in this Blog for many years, Japan has accelerated its consumer law reforms over the last two decades. Australia has also introduced major amendments since 2009, in turn prompting pending initiatives in New Zealand.
Professor Justin Malbon and I recent completed co-editing the first research monograph examining recent Trans-Tasman developments, including significant comparisons with Japan (and beyond) particularly in chapter 3 (generally) and in chapter 8 (consumer product safety regulation). Our 15-chapter book will be published by Federation Press in Sydney in late January 2013.

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Japanese Business Law in Western Languages: An Annotated Selective Bibliography (2nd ed, Hein)

[This is the Preface and Table of Contents manuscript for the 2nd edition, published in 2013 by Hein.]
The literature in Western languages on Japanese law, especially in English and German, continues to proliferate – despite, or perhaps because of, Japan’s economic slowdown after its own “asset bubble” burst in 1990. Law reform has been particularly intense and widespread in business law, necessitating this second edition updating for important works published over the last 15 years.
In 1998 Harald Baum and Luke Nottage published the first edition of their Annotated Selective Bibliography of Japanese Business Law in Western Languages, building on a chapter in Baum’s compendium on Japanese business law published in German in 1994. A new version of the latter published in 2011 included a chapter by Baum, Nottage and Markus Thier listing subsequent works on Japanese business law. That chapter provided the core for the updated references in the second edition of the Annotated Selective Bibliography, co-authored also by Joel Rheuben, but this adds many more references. We also regrouped various chapters and introduced new chapters for fields of law such as Legal Education, Environmental Law, Communications and Information Technology, Employee and University Inventions, Consumer Protection, Product Liability, and Medical Law.
The present edition of the Annotated Selective Bibliography further comprehensively updates the annotated introduction to general works related to Japanese law and the economy, including a completely rewritten guide to finding Japanese business law materials via the internet (for a much briefer version in 2009, see here). Below we set out the rest of the Preface & Acknowledgements, along with the Table of Contents. This second edition went to press in August 2012 and will be published by Hein in early 2013. There are also plans for an e-book version that links to journal articles for subscribers to the HeinOnline database.

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Abandoning all Investor-State Dispute Settlement Mechanisms Also Not Supported by the Facts (updated 17 August)

I am glad the High Court of Australia rejected today the argument by major tobacco companies that Australia’s plain packaging legislation is an unconstitutional “acquisition” of their rights. I dislike those companies’ products, their marketing and their litigation strategies, and I support the plain packaging legislation. I’ve also made numerous submissions to the Australian government since 2005 seeking to improve safety regulation for general consumer goods – partially achieved in the 2010 “Australian Consumer Law”.
But I hope that the ongoing arbitration claim of “expropriation”, initiated by Philip Morris Asia under the 1993 Hong Kong – Australia bilateral investment treaty, does not feed into blanket rejection of any forms of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) in investment treaties. Although that system has flaws, it also has benefits, and there is ample scope to draft treaties to provide clear and appropriate mechanisms to balancing private and public interests. With others familiar with international investment law, I provide further examples of the most promising substantive and procedural law reforms in an Open Letter dated 28 July 2012, in response to a recent OECD Public Consultation on ISDS.
My comment will therefore address points made recently on The Conversation blog by Dr Kyla Tienhaara, who remains completely opposed to any form of ISDS. In fact, she urges the Gillard Government to try to excise ISDS from all Australia’s existing FTAs and investment treaties (dating back to 1988), in addition to eschewing them for future treaties – as the Government seems to be attempting, pursuant to its policy shift on ISDS announced in the 2011 Trade Policy Statement (TPS). An alternative is for the Government to approach Hong Kong authorities to seek agreement on amending the 1993 treaty to suspend PMA’s pending claim. More generally, Australia should consider including ISDS provisions in future treaties but expressly reserve its right to agree with the treaty partner to suspend particular types of claims, for example regarding public health issues. This compromise approach is already essentially found in investment treaty practice where the claim involves allegations of “expropriatory taxation”.

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Finding Legal Work in Japan – the “France of Asia”!

What does “Japan” evoke for you? Fine food, delicate design, pride in a long history and rich culture, powerful bureaucrats, some very big business? But it also has a sophisticated modern legal system, open to outside influences and impacting on other parts of the world – including Thailand, and more recently Cambodia and Vietnam. Just like France, in all these respects! To take the analogy even further: perhaps China is the “Germany of Asia” – now the slightly larger economy, with more focused politics, and a friendly rival for regional leadership.
On 20 August, Sydney Law School (SLS) will hold a student information session on legal practice and educational opportunities in Asia, kindly sponsored this year by “Herbert Smith Freehills”. Offshore units available for SLS course credit include the Kyoto and Tokyo Seminars in Japanese Law, co-taught by Australian- and Japan-based professors and practitioners, every February for Australian, other international and Ritsumeikan University Law School students. I also want to talk briefly about practice opportunities in Japan, based on my personal experience (as a “trainee” with Osaka law firms in the early 90s, while a postgraduate student at Kyoto University) and especially an excellent introduction to “finding legal work in Japan” written a few years ago by a SLS student (“Anon”, still living in Tokyo).

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Open Letter – Assessing Treaty-based Investor-State Dispute Settlement

Some are concerned about treaty-based Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), especially binding Investor-State Arbitration procedures in investment treaties and Free Trade Agreements. One response includes public calls for states to eschew such procedures completely in future treaties, for example in the expanded Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement presently under negotiation. This approach would essentially leave foreign investors to approach local courts if host states illegally interfere with their investments, or to encourage their home states to activate an inter-state dispute resolution process, or to try to negotiate individualised arbitration agreements with host states.
An alternative approach is to identify and address more specific concerns with treaty-based ISDS. An example is the scoping paper and Public Consultation on ISDS generated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, over 16 May – 23 July.
As a constructive contribution to this debate, we created an online form asking for views on whether ISDS should be left as is, abandoned completely, or adapted in various listed ways. As explained below, no respondents favoured eschewing ISDS completely. Yet that position represents the policy shift announced by Australia in the “Gillard Government Trade Policy Statement” (April 2011), resulting in ISDS being omitted from the Australia-Malaysia FTA (May 2012) but difficulties in negotiating other bilateral treaties (with Korea, and Japan) and the TPPA. Implications and other topics related to the TPPA negotiations will be discussed at a Roundtable in Canberra on 8 August, hosted by the Crawford School of Public Policy (ANU College of Asia and the Pacific).

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International Commercial Arbitration in Japan and Australia: Addressing Australia’s “Legislative Black Hole” and Comparing Caselaw

Profs Tatsuya Nakamura, J Romesh Weeramantry and myself will present a public seminar at JCAA in Tokyo on 20 July to compare recent developments in jurisdictions that have based their arbitration legislation on the UNCITRAL Model Law (respectively: Japan, Hong Kong and Australia). Below are details of a follow-up seminar on 13 September in Sydney organised by Sydney Law School and hosted by Clifford Chance, where Prof Nakamura will be the main speaker.
Prof Nakamura and I will also participate on 12 September in Brisbane in an interactive AFIA (Australasian Forum for International Arbitration) symposium hosted by Corrs Chambers Westgarth.
These events are part of our joint research project, “Fostering a Common Culture in Cross-Border Dispute Resolution: Australia, Japan and the Asia-Pacific“, supported by the Commonwealth through the Australia-Japan Foundation which is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Background materials for these three events include:
1. Nakamura, Tatsuya and Nottage, Luke R., Arbitration in Japan (May, 30 2012). ARBITRATION IN ASIA, T. Ginsburg & S. Ali, eds., Juris: NY, Fothcoming; Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 12/39. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2070447
2. Garnett, Richard and Nottage, Luke R., What Law (If Any) Now Applies to International Commercial Arbitration in Australia? (May 2012). Sydney Law School Research Paper No. 12/36. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2063271
The latter identifies the following serious and growing legislative lacuna that has emerged since Australia revised its framework for international arbitration from 2010:

The amendments to the International Arbitration Act 1974 (Cth) (‘IAA’) enacted on 6 July 2010 aimed to reposition Australia as a leading Asia-Pacific venue for international commercial arbitration. They also aimed to streamline and revitalise domestic arbitration by providing the new template for reforms to the uniform Commercial Arbitration Act (‘CAA’) regime, originally enacted in the mid-1980s based on a more interventionist English law tradition.
Yet the IAA amendments did not clearly indicate whether some were intended to apply to (a) international arbitration agreements, (b) specifying the seat of the arbitration to be in Australia, (c) concluded before 6 July 2010, especially if (d) the parties had expressly or impliedly excluded the UNCITRAL Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration pursuant to the original s21 of the IAA. The present authors had suggested that these amendments, especially s 21 which no longer allows such an exclusion, were not intended or presumed to have retrospective effect. The Western Australian Court of Appeal recently agreed, unlike a Federal Court Judge at first instance, although in obiter dicta in both cases.
This article restates the problems created by the IAA amendments (Part II), analyses Australian case law decided since 6 July 2010 (Part III), and then proposes a way forward – including comparisons with other Asia-Pacific jurisdictions that have recently enacted arbitration law reforms, especially Singapore and Hong Kong (Part IV). It recommends prompt further IAA amendments that: (i) clarify that at least the new s 21 does not have retrospective effect, (ii) limit a persistent tendency among some Australian courts to infer that a selection of arbitration rules amounts to an implied exclusion of the Model Law under the old s 21, and (iii) consider several other reforms addressing other issues left unclear or not covered in the IAA as amended in 2010.
The article also urges reforms to the new uniform CAA regime (including CAA legislation already enacted in NSW, Victoria and South Australia) that ‘save’ old international arbitration agreements satisfying conditions (a)-(d) above. The old CAA legislation, or at least the new CAA regime, should clearly apply to such agreements – otherwise they will fall into a ‘legislative black hole’. That problem arises because states are enacting the new CAAs to apply only to ‘domestic’ arbitration agreements, while simply repealing the old CAAs (which applied also to international arbitration agreements, especially if the parties had agreed to exclude the Model Law as permitted by the old s 21 of the IAA).

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Guest Blog: “Bureaucratic Capture” in Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Compensation Scheme?

Written by: Joel Rheuben (University of Tokyo, LLM Program)
More than a year on from the near-meltdown of several reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”), the plant’s owner and operator, is continuing the slow process of compensating evacuees and others from the area surrounding the plant for damage to property and loss of income and livelihood as a result of the disaster. According to TEPCO’s website, as at 1 June 2012, the company had processed some 668,000 of a total of 764,000 (and counting) claims, provisionally worth JPY 856.6 billion (USD 11.7 billion).

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Book Review – Mark D West, “Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law”

Mark D West, Lovesick Japan: Sex, Marriage, Romance, Law (Cornell University Press, Ithaca/London, 2011, viii + 259pp, hardcover US$29, e-version $18.44 via http://www.amazon.com/Lovesick-Japan-Sex-Marriage-Romance/dp/0801449472
[Published in 33 Journal of Japanese Law 253-8 (2012), with a shorter version also in 32(2) Japanese Studies 299-301 (2012).]
This is the third book with “sex” in the title that has been written since 2005 by the Nippon Life Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. Although it is beautifully written in a conversational style, opens up some intriguing insights, and reflects very extensive research, this work is probably the least successful of the three. This reviewer, at least, hopes that Mark West will now divert his formidable talents to examining other areas of Japanese law and society, including further research in the field that initially established his career – namely, “Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan” (Oxford University, 2004, co-edited with Curtis Milhaupt).
West’s book on “Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes” (University of Chicago Press, 2005) actually did not focus much on sex. But it showed convincingly how law has played important roles in the development of the “love hotel” industry, as in many other areas of everyday life in Japan. His book on “Secrets, Sex and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States” (University of Chicago Press, 2005) contained more sex. But this arose as part of detailed analysis of important differences – and some similarities – in the two countries’ societies and legal systems relevant to scandals, including corporate fraud, baseball cheaters and political corruption. By contrast, West’s latest book on “Lovesick Japan” is full of sex – caveat emptor (buyer beware)!
In this book West pursues the argument that “law matters” in Japan, but in unusual as well as more mundane life situations. Indeed, he argues that “Japanese judges, who have significant discretion, play a surprisingly direct role of arbiters of emotions in intimate relationships” (p9). Further, unlike his earlier works, West focuses predominantly on how Japanese judges write and reason about sex, marriage and “love” more generally, in their publically-available judgments covering a broad array of legal and social topics. He argues that a “state-endorsed judicial view” (p9) emerges not just from the way the legally relevant facts (and sometimes seemingly irrelevant facts) are presented, but also from the legal analysis – with the combination often suggesting broad problems: a “lovesick Japan”. Specifically (p8):

Love, for instance, is highly valued in Japan, but in judges’ opinions, it usually appears as a tragic, overwhelming emotion associated with jealousy, suffering, heartache, and death. Other less debilitating emotions and conditions, including “feelings”, “earnestness” and “mutual affection” appear in unexpected areas of the law such as cases of underage sex and adultery. Sex in the opinions presents a choice among (a) private “normal” sex, which is male-dominated, conservative, dispassionate, or nonexistent; (b) commercial sex, which caters to every fetish but is said to lead to rape, murder, and general social depravity; and (c) a hybrid of the two in which courts commodify private sexual relationships. Marriage usually has neither love nor sex; judges raise the ideal of love in marriage and proclaim its importance, but virtually no one in the cases achieves it. Instead, married life is best conceptualized as the fulfillment of a contract.

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‘Business Law in Japan – Cases and Comments’ – Festschrift for Harald Baum (Kluwer, 2012)

[Adapted from the 21 May news item from the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law (MPI)]
A ground-breaking English-language summary and commentary on leading Japanese judgments in the field of business law has been published as a Festschrift to mark the 60th birthday of Harald Baum, the Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Japan Unit at the MPI in Hamburg. Students, colleagues and friends of Harald Baum from Europe, Japan, the USA and Australia [namely, Luke Nottage] honour the achievements of the longstanding Max Planck academic with a collection of 72 judgments from Japanese courts on issues of intellectual property rights, civil law and international private and business law.
The collection of cases edited by Moritz Bälz, Marc Dernauer, Christopher Heath and Anja Petersen-Padberg complements the Handbuch Japanisches Handels- und Wirtschaftsrecht (Encyclopedia of Japanese Commercial and Business Law) which Harald Baum edited with Moritz Bälz in 2011. The Festschrift contains contributions from over 50 notable authors from academia and legal practice and thus becomes one of the standard works on Japanese business law written in a Western language. The publishers note their intention of ensuring that the contributions do justice to the high academic standards repeatedly set by the honouree.
The Festschrift was presented to him at the Institute by the publishers on 14 May 2012 during an academic ceremony, including an address by Prof. John O. Haley. Prof. Dr. Harald Baum has been a Senior Research Fellow and Head of the Japan Unit he founded at the Institute in Hamburg since 1985. As founding editor since 1996 of the Zeitschrift für Japanisches Recht / Journal of Japanese Law, he has had a significant impact on comparative research and academic discussions in this area. [The Australian Network for Japanese Law helps in editing and promoting the Journal, and is pleased to have Prof. Baum as a founding member of ANJeL’s Advisory Board. ANJeL warmly congratulates him and the editors on this latest book, which is described further below (adapted from the Kluwer website).]

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TPP negotiations and the IBA’s Draft Rules on Investor-State Mediation

As NZ lawyer Daniel Kalderimis points out recently, concerns about treaty-based investor-state arbitration (ISA) have been:

stirred up by the release of an “Open Letter from Lawyers to the Negotiators of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Urging the Rejection of Investor-State Dispute Settlement” on 8 May 2012. The letter is backed by well-meaning, and several well-known, signatories; most of whom are not especially well-informed about investor-state arbitration. The fact of the letter is welcome, as the issues are important. But the letter itself contains several overstatements and does not make a balanced contribution to the debate.

Another oddity about the “Open Letter” is that it refers generically to “Investor-State Dispute Settlement” (ISDS) and ends by calling on “all governments engaged in the TPP [Trans-Pacific Partnership FTA] negotiations to follow Australia’s example by rejecting the Investor-State dispute mechanism and reasserting the integrity of our domestic legal processes”. ISDS incorporates both ISA (where the parties agree to be bound by the arbitrators’ decision) and investor-state mediation (“ISM”) or conciliation procedures (where the parties agree to negotiate a settlement but are not obliged to accept any proposals made by the third-party neutral mediator). At least the rest of the “Open Letter” indicates that the primary objection is to binding ISA.
By contrast, the “Gillard Government Trade Policy Statement” (April 2011) simply eschews ISDS in Australia’s future treaties, including the TPP. Perhaps the Statement meant only ISA, which allows greater inroads into host state sovereignty, given that overall it draws on the Productivity Commission’s recommendations from a 2010 Trade Policy Review report. But, by seemingly eschewing all forms of ISA, the Statement seems to go beyond the Commission’s recommendation on ISA itself.
Hopefully the Australian government, other states involved in FTA negotiations (such as the TPP) and those who wish to improve the ISA system (such as myself) or abandon it altogether (as do some signatories to the Open Letter) will not simply transpose their objections over to ISM too. There is significant scope for mediating investor-state disputes, and indeed the Draft Rules on ISM published recently by the International Bar Association (IBA) are a valuable guide to conducting mediation more effectively. Below I set out some preliminary analysis of those Draft Rules, prepared for the Law Council of Australia but representing my own personal views – particularly regarding the scope for arbitrators to adopt them as a means of settling ISA claims earlier and more effectively (ie ‘Arb-Med‘). A fully-footnoted version of my views is available on request, and I encourage feedback.

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