ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the key issues with regard to the rule of law in Asia. It considers that of judicialization, the qualitative expansion of the role and authority of courts to make and influence policy decisions. The region has seen the development of constitutional courts as well as an expansion in judicial authority over administrative action. A major theme of the literature is whether these phenomena of the rule of law, judicialization, and constitutionalism are inexorably tied to democratization. Japan's sixth-century adoption of Buddhism was accompanied by the adoption of a "Constitution" that laid out promises and principles of rule in a Chinese vein. The quality of democracy, then, changes with judicialization, and this has been true in South Korea and Taiwan as well as other countries, notwithstanding some criticisms about the rarity of public hearings in those jurisdictions' constitutional courts. A crucial question for further work is to understand the interaction between the trajectories of judicial power and democratization.
