Roman Tomasic is Professor of Law at the University of South Australia and Visiting Professor of Company Law, Durham University UK; Leon Wolff is Associate Professor of Law at Bond University, Australia and Co-Director of the Australian Network for Japanese Law (ANJeL).

• Contents: Introduction: mapping the contours of East Asian commercial law for the Asian century; Part I General Issues: Rationale: What is the Importance of East Asian Commercial Law Both Now and in the Future?: The future of law in a global economy, Richard P. Appelbaum. Rule of Law: Does the Rule of Law Matter in East Asian Commercial Law?: Property rights, collateral, creditor rights, and insolvency in East Asia, Douglas W. Arner, Charles D. Booth, Paul Lejot and Berry F.C. Hsu; Economic development and the rights hypothesis: the China problem, Donald C. Clarke; Testing the limits to the ’rule of law’: commercial regulation in Vietnam, John Gillespie. Global and Local Influences; To What Extent is Asian Commercial Law a Mix of the Global and the Local?: Legal transplantation and local knowledge: corporate governance in Malaysia, Mohammad Rizal Salim; Living with the IMF: a new approach to corporate governance and regulation of financial institutions in Korea, Hwa-Jin Kim; Legal transplants through private contracting: codes of vendor conduct in global supply chains as an example, Li-Wen Lin. Part II Case Studies: Negotiations: Cultivating guanxi as a foreign investor strategy, John A. Pearce II and Richard B. Robinson Jr; Caveats for cross-border negotiators, James K. Sebenius. Commercial transactions: The norms and incentive structures of relational contracting in Vietnam - two surveys, Quan H. Nguyen; Rethinking relationship-specific investments: subcontracting in the Japanese automobile industry, Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer. Commercial Dispute Resolution: Aggressive legalism: the rules of the WTO and Japan’s emerging trade strategy, Saadia M. Pekkanen; No more negotiated deals?: settlement of trade and investment disputes in East Asia, Junji Nakagawa. Corporate Law and Corporate Governance: The establishment and development of the Chinese economic legal system in the past 60 years, Chen Su; Berle and Means, corporate governance and the Chinese fami