Transcriptional control in the prereplicative phase of T4 development

Control of transcription is crucial for correct gene expression and orderly development. For many years, bacteriophage T4 has provided a simple model system to investigate mechanisms that regulate this process. Development of T4 requires the transcription of early, middle and late RNAs. Because T4 does not encode its own RNA polymerase, it must redirect the polymerase of its host, E. coli, to the correct class of genes at the correct time. T4 accomplishes this through the action of phage-encoded factors. Here I review recent studies investigating the transcription of T4 prereplicative genes, which are expressed as early and middle transcripts. Early RNAs are generated immediately after infection from T4 promoters that contain excellent recognition sequences for host polymerase. Consequently, the early promoters compete extremely well with host promoters for the available polymerase. T4 early promoter activity is further enhanced by the action of the T4 Alt protein, a component of the phage head that is injected into E. coli along with the phage DNA. Alt modifies Arg265 on one of the two α subunits of RNA polymerase. Although work with host promoters predicts that this modification should decrease promoter activity, transcription from some T4 early promoters increases when RNA polymerase is modified by Alt. Transcription of T4 middle genes begins about 1 minute after infection and proceeds by two pathways: 1) extension of early transcripts into downstream middle genes and 2) activation of T4 middle promoters through a process called sigma appropriation. In this activation, the T4 co-activator AsiA binds to Region 4 of σ70, the specificity subunit of RNA polymerase. This binding dramatically remodels this portion of σ70, which then allows the T4 activator MotA to also interact with σ70. In addition, AsiA restructuring of σ70 prevents Region 4 from forming its normal contacts with the -35 region of promoter DNA, which in turn allows MotA to interact with its DNA binding site, a MotA box, centered at the -30 region of middle promoter DNA. T4 sigma appropriation reveals how a specific domain within RNA polymerase can be remolded and then exploited to alter promoter specificity

Shariʿa as taboo of modern law: Halal food, Islamophobia, and China

On July 1, 2016, a Chinese Muslim (Hui) man named Mr. Xian Guolin, from Gansu province, opened a halal beef noodle shop near People’s Square, the center of Shanghai. On July 12, Mr. Xian reported on Weixin (a popular peer-to-peer micro-blogging site in the People’s Republic of China, or PRC), that a group of approximately 100 Hui, claiming to represent halal restaurants in Shanghai, gathered in front of the restaurant to protest its opening. The Hui argued that the restaurant violated the “Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Agreement,” an oral understanding among the Hui business community that no one will open a halal restaurant within 400 meters of an existing one (hereinafter the “400-meter rule”). There were, in fact, at least two other halal restaurants in the neighborhood surrounding Xian’s restaurant. Over the next week, scores of Hui gathered in front of Xian’s restaurant accosting customers, destroying the restaurant’s tables, and threatening Xian’s relatives. Xian documented all of this on Weixin, where netizens called his attackers the “noodle mafia.” In response, non-Muslim Han Chinese residents of Shanghai patronized Xian’s restaurant in solidarity against the enforcement of the 400-meter rule, saying that it was an extralegal rule and only state law, not “ethnic rules” should apply to such disputes. On July 19, the police intervened by mediating the dispute, and Xian agreed to alter his restaurant’s Chinese sign, by taking down the halal (qingzhen) symbol and characters for “beef meat” (niurou). While the dispute fizzled, online commentators were incensed at the outcome, claiming, “what was wiped out was not ‘beef meat’ but the legal system!” and “religion has replaced the law,” asserting that religious mob justice had superseded formal law.</p

The new legal hubs: the emergent landscape of international commercial dispute resolution

New legal hubs (NLHs) are “one-stop shops” for cross-border commercial dispute resolution, often found in financial centers, and promoted as an official policy by nondemocratic or hybrid (i.e., democratic and authoritarian) states. NLHs address the problems of the legitimacy deficit of host states and also insufficient economic growth. They do so by optimizing conflict of law rules, namely choice of forum and efficiency of procedure, attracting international parties to the hub venue. Further, they suggest a novel heuristic in the study of transnational law, particularly during a period of geo-political and ideological flux. This article is based on empirical fieldwork over a period of two years in six NLHs in four countries across “Inter-Asia,” including Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Dubai, and Kazakhstan. It analyses legal hubs at two levels: their impact on host states and interhub connections as a form of transnational ordering. This article finds that, first, legal hubs are engines of doctrinal, procedural, and technological experimentation, but they have had limited impact on the reform of the wider jurisdictions within which they are embedded. Second, through relationships of competition and complementarity, legal hubs function to enhance normative settlement. However, many of the innovations (e.g., intrahub cross-institutional mechanisms between courts and arbitration institutions and interhub soft law such as memoranda of understanding) are untested, vulnerable to state politics, or even unlawful. Consequently, NLHs demonstrate the potential and fragility of “rule of law” in nondemocratic states that promote globalization against trends in the West. The article begins with an introduction that defines NLHs, identifies their significance as jurisdictional carve-outs to otherwise weak legal systems of host states, and proposes an anthropology of legal hubs. Part II sets the analysis of NLHs against the backdrop of a partially deglobalizing Euro-American liberal legal order and a globalizing Inter-Asian one. Part III describes the methodology of “para-ethnography.” Part IV provides a theory of NLHs. Part V builds on this theory to generate a continuum of NLHs. Part VI assesses how NLHs and their host states affect each other, including hubs’ positive spillover effects and host state pushback. Part VII examines the possibilities for interhub ordering

Anticorruption as transnational law: The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, PRC law, and party rules in China

Corruption has been linked to urgent transnational problems, including, inter alia, market uncertainties, the undermining of democracy, economic disparity, religious extremism, and authoritarianism. As corruption is a global problem, it requires coordination across states’ anticorruption laws. Anticorruption thus provides grounds to reassess the promise and limits of transnational law. This Article examines the operation of anticorruption as transnational law across the corporate governance regimes of the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies. As opposed to perceptions that Washington and Beijing are engaged in a zero-sum game, anticorruption is a policy concern against which both states may rally. Inter-regulatory coordination is far from a frictionless process, however. Cross-border lawyers working on both sides of the Pacific engaged in anticorruption law are a type of transnational community and highlight these tensions. Lawyers apply standards in the 1977 U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the People’s Republic of China antibribery laws, and internal Chinese Communist Party rules to ensure their clients comply with multiple regimes. Ethnographic data shows that lawyers assess different regulatory environments, in this case, one of extraterritorial jurisdiction and the other characterized by a political campaign, in the course of advising multinational companies. The Article argues that lawyers’ roles are a lynchpin of these overlapping systems of compliance as their work operates to discipline corporations in China; nonetheless, lawyers’ position in the global legal market impacts what they deem to be “corrupt” and which rules apply. A focus on cross-border lawyers as transnational communities thus marries legal analysis with a contextual grounding in lawyers’ work, an approach that has merit for the study of comparative law more generally. The Article finds that given market pressures, in the area of anticorruption, trends show a preference for “bicultural lawyers,” those who are both embedded within transnational communities and respond to demands in the global market

Shariʿa as taboo of modern law: Halal food, Islamophobia, and China

On July 1, 2016, a Chinese Muslim (Hui) man named Mr. Xian Guolin, from Gansu province, opened a halal beef noodle shop near People’s Square, the center of Shanghai. On July 12, Mr. Xian reported on Weixin (a popular peer-to-peer micro-blogging site in the People’s Republic of China, or PRC), that a group of approximately 100 Hui, claiming to represent halal restaurants in Shanghai, gathered in front of the restaurant to protest its opening. The Hui argued that the restaurant violated the “Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Agreement,” an oral understanding among the Hui business community that no one will open a halal restaurant within 400 meters of an existing one (hereinafter the “400-meter rule”). There were, in fact, at least two other halal restaurants in the neighborhood surrounding Xian’s restaurant. Over the next week, scores of Hui gathered in front of Xian’s restaurant accosting customers, destroying the restaurant’s tables, and threatening Xian’s relatives. Xian documented all of this on Weixin, where netizens called his attackers the “noodle mafia.” In response, non-Muslim Han Chinese residents of Shanghai patronized Xian’s restaurant in solidarity against the enforcement of the 400-meter rule, saying that it was an extralegal rule and only state law, not “ethnic rules” should apply to such disputes. On July 19, the police intervened by mediating the dispute, and Xian agreed to alter his restaurant’s Chinese sign, by taking down the halal (qingzhen) symbol and characters for “beef meat” (niurou). While the dispute fizzled, online commentators were incensed at the outcome, claiming, “what was wiped out was not ‘beef meat’ but the legal system!” and “religion has replaced the law,” asserting that religious mob justice had superseded formal law.</p

Defining Shariʿa in China: State, Ahong, and the Post-Secular Turn

Just as shariʿa (Islamic law) has been demonized globally, so too, paradoxically, have governments sought to appropriate Islamic authority for secular rule. Based on nineteen months of field research in northwest China, this article offers some preliminary thoughts on the ways in which the party-state manipulates shariʿa for purposes of rule. Through the example of the China Islamic Association, an organization constituted under the Chinese Communist Party in 1953, the author argues that the party-state’s evolving relationship to Islamic authority demonstrates what he calls the “postsecular.” Rather than discursively demarcating (legitimate) secular law from (illegitimate) religious law, the China Islamic Association has, since 2001, a watershed year in the relationship between secular and Islamic authority, sought to expound law from the revealed sources of Islam that are congruent with Chinese socialism and nationalism

China and comparative international law: between social science and critique

This Essay brings Abebe, Chilton, and Ginsburg’s Lead Essay into conversation with the literature on comparative international law to ask whether the social scientific approach to international law is “international.” In particular, this Essay takes the case of scholarship on international law in China to examine why or why not particular methodological and theoretical perspectives on international law may gain traction in certain jurisdictions’ legal academies. There are a number of linguistic, pedagogic, institutional, and, ultimately, political reasons why the Chinese scholarship that uses social science to understand international law is still nascent. At the same time, critical approaches to international law in the Chinese literature are ascendant. This Essay explains these divergent trends through a sociology of knowledge lens and offers provisional thoughts about future trajectories for the study of international law in a period during which China’s influence on the international system will most likely grow