UCLA Pacific Basin Law Journal

This Article is the third in a series that explores the role that unreliable American pseudo-psychology plays in the New Zealand Family Court's inadequate responses to family violence. In "Endangered by Junk Science," I argued that the Court relies upon "expert" opinion evidence based on behavioral-science principles, forensic methods, and fallacious statistical reasoning that lack both foundational and as-applied validity to determine children's best interests and that the result has been entrenched pseudo-scientific mythologies that endanger women and children, immunize violent fathers, and silence children's voices. In "Sub Silentio Alienation," I argued that these failures are the result of implicit associations and cognitive barriers, gender bias, and the close relationship between Family Court Judges and court psychologists, which preculde internal reform. In this Artitcle, I advance a third cause of the failure of the New Zealand Family Court to respond adequately and appropriately to unreliable expert evidence: the inability of the New Zealand Psychological Board (NZPB) to regulate and address the pseudo-science of parental alienation (PA) in the same way that American psychology boards have. This inability stems from the insistence by the courts in Aotearoa, New Zealand that they possess a de facto monopoly on determining the qualifications, ethics, and reliability of their expert psychologists. The result has been the inundation of pseudo-psychology in the Family Court, much of it generated by for-profit American consultants who are not academic researchers, do not publish in peer-reviewed psychology journals, and some of whom have been disciplined by psychology boards in the United States for their professional misconduct.

This Article traces changes in the prison system in communist China and examines the relationship between the legal functions of prisons and the legitimation strategies of the state in different economic contexts. This Article finds that economic schemes and legitimation strategies are the two pivotal factors driving the prison system and shaping penal practices. In the early planned economy period, the Chinese government built its legitimacy on the revolutionary ideology to create a communist country, so the legal functions of the Chinese prison system focused on remodeling of prisoners through collective forced labor. Later, in the time of economic reform, legitimacy of the regime stemmed from its economic performance, so the legal function of the Chinese prison system shifted towards profit maximization, focusing all of its efforts on production. As the economic reform developed further, the Chinese government based its legitimacy on legal rules to accomplish its various goals, leading to the codification of the prison system to achieve the goals of scientization and socialization.

After the UK published the UK Stewardship Code in 2010, several other jurisdictions followed suit and published their own versions of stewardship codes. The focus on institutional investor stewardship has become a global trend in recent years. In 2016, Taiwan joined the trend by launching the “Stewardship Principles for Institutional Investors” (Taiwan Stewardship Code). As the Taiwan Stewardship Code has been based on the UK Stewardship, this Article first conducts a comparative analysis between the Taiwan and UK Stewardship Codes. To shed more light on institutional investor stewardship in Taiwan, this Article reviews the 2020 stewardship reports of all 153 signatories of the Taiwan Stewardship Code, which were released exactly five years after the launch of the Taiwan Stewardship Code . Examining the signatories’ stewardship activities in several aspects, this Article found that the signatories’ stewardship is far from satisfying. Not only does the level of stewardship fall short of the Taiwan Stewardship Code’s expectations, but the signatories also have not been following the requirements of the Taiwan Stewardship Code. Based on these findings, it can be concluded that the Taiwan Stewardship Code has been ineffective in promoting stewardship among Taiwan institutional investors. To achieve that end, the Taiwan Stewardship Code will need to be revised significantly. This Article proposes and analyzes several potential improvements to the Taiwan Stewardship Code so that it can ultimately strengthen Taiwan’s corporate governance system.

Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh were all established on a sense of wanting to be a majority in a nation where they were once “othered,” be it by the British, Hindu majority, or Urdu-speaking majority. As a result, religious independence and mother-tongue/linguistic independence are highly valued in these countries, and are the context by which the morality of trademarks within the borders of these countries are assessed. Notions of free speech traditions and political ideologies that also color traditions are discussed, as they also run abreast trademark law. Although these three countries once emerged from one land, they carry differences as distinct and rich as the cultural and religious historical tensions that define them. Each sought to create a space where their cultural and religious identities were represented fairly. As thus, it is no surprise that religion is such an important consideration that it was codified into each country’s trademark law.

This paper aims to illustrate what each country deems as running afoul to notions of morality and religious susceptibilities, and how that may have changed over time with politics and other social factors. The factors that may have influenced these definitions is assessed in depth by country, with homage to the political structures and free speech traditions within which they are nested. A framework of what would and what wouldn’t qualify as a registrable trademark under the morality bar is posited through an analysis of government guidelines on registering trademarks, case law, and a comparative analysis of certain marks that were treated one way under one country’s standard but could be treated differently under different standards from other countries.