Legal Governance of World Cities: A Comparative Study of New York City and Tokyo

Author: Zhang Zhiming et al.
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: This book is the final outcome of the research project "The Rule of Law Indicators for World Cities: An International Comparative Study." The background of the project is the vision of Shanghai as a law-based international metropolis. It selects several typical world cities worldwide as references, providing practices that can beed, and attempts to quantify and index the rule of law governance of world cities as much as possible in a comparable sense. Over the course of more than a year from 2003 to 2004, the research team went through the process of project proposal, implementation, determining theoretical assumptions, analyzing frameworks, research methods, collecting literature, screening relevant information, and writing reports—often complex and arduous. As scholars who have long been concerned with and studied the rule of law, reviewing this process clearly shows that our understanding of the research topic of this project has gone through a journey of confidence, confusion, and gradual clarification—sometimes bright as spring sunshine, sometimes as arduous as traversing mountains and rivers, and sometimes as hopeful as a willow-lined path. Such a process itself serves as a concrete example of rule of law research. Recording it may contribute to the further advancement of rule of law research. This book has been included in the series "Major Theoretical and Practical Problem Research."