Courts and Democracies in Asia

Po Jen Yap is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong (HKU), Faculty of Law, where he specialises in comparative constitutional law. He graduated from the National University of Singapore with an LL.B. degree and he obtained LL.M. qualifications from both Harvard Law School and University College London. He also has a Ph.D. degree from the University of Cambridge. He is an Advocate and Solicitor of the Supreme Court of Singapore and an Attorney at Law in the State of New York (USA). His publications include Constitutional Dialogue in Common Law Asia (2015).

• 1. Introduction; Part I. Dominant-Party Democracies: 2. Supreme Court of Singapore and the promise of enforceable constitutional conventions; 3. Malaysian courts and electoral fraud; 4. Hong Kong Courts and constitutional contradictions; Part II. Dynamic Democracies: 5. Supreme Court of India and criminality in politics; 6. Constitutional court of Taiwan and calibrated judicial review; 7. Constitutional court of Korea and systemic electoral barriers; Part III. Fragile Democracies: 8. Constitutional court of Thailand and partisan judges; 9. Supreme Court of Pakistan: accommodation and defiance of military authority; 10. Supreme Court of Bangladesh and defensive judicial review; Part IV. Democratic Values and Courts in Comparative Perspective: 11. Democratic values and the conundrum of unconstitutional constitutional amendments; 12. Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'Po Jen Yap's new book is a must-read in the growing literature on the role of constitutional courts in democratic stabilization. Its fine-grained analyses demonstrates that the political power and vulnerability of courts in protecting democratic processes as well as their own independence is not fixed or prescribable in the abstract, but varies with the state of democratization and party contestation in which they operate.' Stephen Gardbaum, MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice and Human Rights, University of California, Los Angeles