Special jurisdictions are often evaluated by the institutions and procedures they formally establish. Formal supply, however, does not show whether institutional functions connect with disputes at stages relevant to their intended roles. This article examines that problem in the Hainan Free Trade Port. It combines a 180-record main judicial baseline, a nested 133-record applicable-law sample and a separate 52-record arbitration-interface sample with targeted specialist-court searches and a supply-side desk audit. The results reveal differentiated ordinary-court, maritime and intellectual-property pathways rather than a single foreign-related caseload. Arbitration, mediation and professional-support functions become visible through distinct interfaces and procedural stages. Public evidence is strongest for judicial support and post-allocation interfaces, while early-stage selection and routing connections to ordinary-court pathways are only sparsely traceable in the available materials. Particular records nevertheless document successful issue-specific activation of applicable-law and professional support. The article develops institutional connection as an intermediate analytical layer between formal availability and operational accessibility. It treats stage alignment as function-specific by asking whether each connection occurs within the relevant function's effective window. At the level of publicly documented institutional connection and stage alignment, the evidence provides partial support for a bounded design-demand mismatch. Inverted capacity remains a stronger institutional hypothesis requiring comparative and longitudinal evidence of persistent operational failure.
Through a comparative institutional analysis of Japan and South Korea, this article examines whether middle powers can engage in hedging behaviour by simultaneously accommodating competing U.S. and EU digital mandates within their domestic legal orders. The article argues that dual engagement with divergent normative systems generates a 'dual lock-in effect' - overlapping treaty commitments that systematically constrain domestic regulatory space. This constraint operates in two ways. First, divergent treaty frameworks render uniform national legislation inherently difficult, as a single domestic law must simultaneously accommodate two potentially incompatible normative architectures. Second, both the U.S. and the EU possess independent structural power to compel compliance, leaving the hedging state with limited room for sustainable equivocation. The article concludes that middle powers such as Japan and South Korea must strengthen domestic regulatory assessment mechanisms and pursue multilateral solutions where bilateral arrangements have proven insufficient.
This article examines how the Indonesian Constitutional Court responds to requests for provisional decisions (putusan provisi) - interim orders sought to prevent constitutional harm while a challenge to a statute is heard. Applicants frequently ask the Court to expedite a hearing, to suspend an impugned provision, or to order an official to refrain from acting pending the final decision. Drawing on the Court's published decisions, I show that it has almost always refused, and that the grounds it gives for refusing are applied neither consistently nor transparently. On the rare occasions the Court has granted interim relief, it has not adequately explained why those cases warranted a departure from its usual practice. I argue that the Court should articulate a structured test, of the kind developed by other constitutional courts and international tribunals, and apply it openly. A clearer practice would make the Court's orders harder to dismiss as politics and easier to defend as law.
