Report on the 4th Asian Private International Law Academy (APILA) Conference

The 4th Asian Private International Law Academy (APILA) Conference was held on 13–14 December 2025 in Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan). The two-day Conference explored a wide variety of questions and issues on private international law in Asia. It featured 21 papers delivered by leading and emerging scholars. Each paper was followed by a Q&A and discussion session among over 40 attendees. Attendees thoroughly enjoyed the rich intellectual exchanges within the close-knit (and expanding) community of APILA, and also the reception (with an impressive selection of food and drinks) on the first night of the Conference.

The keynote address this year was delivered by Dr Chukwuma Okoli, Assistant Professor in Commercial Conflict of Laws at the University of Birmingham. Dr Okoli spoke about his ongoing project, ‘Choice of Law for Employment Contracts in Africa: Imitation, Evolution and Revolution’. He argued that Africa plays an important role in shaping cross-border issues of employment contracts, and African perspectives should be considered in future harmonisation efforts on the topic. He also reflected critically on the development of African private international law, and the lessons from and for Asian private international law.

The 20 papers focused on a vast array of topics, encompassing theoretical and practical aspects of private international law in a wide range of Asian jurisdictions. A list of papers presented at the Conference (in alphabetical order of their titles) is as follows:

• Bankruptcy and Foreign Immovable Property: The Way Forward from Kireeva
• Beyond Performance Metrics: Explaining the Slow Growth of International Commercial Courts Compared to Arbitration
• Can Genuine Harmonisation in International Commercial Arbitration be Achieved without Islamic Law: Reconsidering Islamic Law’s Alleged Incommensurability with Civil and Common Law
• Cross-Border Insolvency and International Arbitration Agreements at Common Law
• Do Directors Owe a Duty to Ensure Corporate Compliance with (Foreign) Law?
• Global Standard Setting for the North? Rethinking the Regulatory Transformation of Private International Law from a Global South Perspective
• How to Unintentionally Win Two Japanese Moots: AI Tools and Multilingual Advocacy
• International Family Law: Quo Vadis?
• Islamic Law and Private International Law in Non-Muslim Majority Jurisdictions: Rethinking Private International Law through the Philippine and Australian Experience
• Islamic Law before Japanese Courts: Special Focus on Dissolution of Marriage
• Law Applicable to Tokenisation: Medium-Centred vs Right-Centred Approaches
• LGBTQ and Private International Law: Recognition of Same-Sex Marriage and its Effects in Japan
• Overstepping TRIPS
• Private International Law in Transnational Personal Data Litigation: Chinese Perspective
• Reassessing the Mode of Proof of Foreign Law
• Recognising Foreign Gender Identity in Hong Kong through Private International Law
• Rethinking Jurisdiction in the Era of Generative AI
• Standing and Characterisation in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Disputes in Private International Law: Türkiye’s Position as a Bridge between Asia and Europe
• The Establishment of the Competence-Competence Principle in the Chinese Arbitration Act 2026
• The Law Applicable to Crypto Assets in Japanese Courts: Comparative and Methodological Considerations

The 5th APILA Conference will be held on 12–13 December 2026 in Seoul, South Korea. Interested speakers and attendees may wish to mark their diaries now. A call for papers will be circulated in due course.