As is well known, the cornerstone of modern Western jurisprudence is the autonomous individual. The intellectual origins of the concept of individuality can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy, particularly to the ontological distinction between “matter” and “consciousness,” as well as Socrates’ sceptical differentiation between earthly, imperfect knowledge (doxa) and heavenly “true knowledge” (epistēmē), which together form a realist category of binary opposition. Since the Renaissance, this line of thought gradually evolved into Descartes’ mind-body dualism and the principle of subjectivity in the bourgeois revolutions. Following a reductionist methodology, it gave rise to an atomistic view of the individual, liberal ideas, the legal principle of party autonomy, and a series of institutional designs and axiomatic systems of law aimed at safeguarding natural and fundamental rights inherent in human beings.

In sharp contrast, the fundamental principle of traditional Chinese order lies in the unity of Heaven and humanity (tian ren he yi) and reciprocity in social intercourse (li shang wang lai), giving rise to a so-called relation-based society that transcends the dichotomies of matter and consciousness, object and subject.Footnote ¹

Although the global movement of “law and modernization” and “law and development” made individual rights a basic goal of social transformation in China and other Asian societies, with far-reaching influence, Clifford Geertz argued that this Western conception of the individual also draws boundaries around the person, reducing him to an atomistic particle set in opposition to the natural and social background. Thus, however powerful this individualism may be, from the perspective of the world’s major civilizations and diverse cultures, it remains, after all, a particularistic idea (see Geertz, Reference Geertz1974, p. 31). The emergence of this view marks the self-reflection of 20th-century academia (not limited to anthropology and sociology) on the Enlightenment movement that had surged since the 17th century, as well as its search for new ideals of social justice and more inclusive institutional arrangements. For the simple sum of individual rationalities does not lead to collective rationality; indeed, negotiation aimed at maximizing individual interests often excludes the most reasonable public choices from the set of options. It is therefore necessary to break down individual boundaries and, by redefining the status and role of the individual, achieve other-oriented and collectively oriented communicative rationality, as well as social cooperation based on the principle of reciprocity and mutual benefit.

In fact, entering the 20th century, the scientific and technological revolution centred on Einstein’s theory of relativity and the quantum mechanics of Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, together with the pluralization of society, led to a paradigm shift in philosophy—from substantiality to relationality. For example, Edmund Husserl understood the foundation of the lifeworld as “intersubjectivity” (the interaction of subjects with subjects), while Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology emphasized reflective intersubjectivity in which the other is inherent in the self’s consciousness. On the other hand, Martin Heidegger explicitly asserted that “language is the house of being,” founding an existentialism in which subject and object coexist. The later Wittgenstein also advocated a philosophy of everyday language focused on the ground of life, context dependence, and practical orientation—all of which negate the absolute essence of the object.

Echoing this, in the field of sociology, Georg Simmel’s formal sociology focused on the interactive relationships between people; George Herbert Mead, building on social behaviourism, founded symbolic interactionism; Harold Garfinkel, through his distinctive ethnomethodology, examined and analysed how people form, maintain, and interpret social order in everyday life; Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy concentrated on performance strategies and facework in interpersonal interactions. Pierre Bourdieu grasped the patterns of interactive relationships and resource supply networks from the perspective of network structures and spatial positions, arguing that the “field” that defines relationships possesses not only energy but also the capacity to generate value. By the early 21st century, the analysis of interactive relationships and social networks had come to be understood as a new paradigm for the social sciences (see Crossley, Reference Crossley2011; Donati, Reference Donati2011).

It is against this backdrop that legal theory has also begun to undergo corresponding transformations. For example, Austin’s analytical jurisprudence, which emerged in the 19th century, and Hart’s new analytical jurisprudence, which flourished in the 20th century, formed a closed loop of language and logic, thereby providing a precondition for the idea that communication, rather than the individual, should be the smallest unit of society. In a complementary vein, Ehrlich’s Fundamental Principles of the Sociology of Law, published in 1913, acknowledged and even advocated the pluralization and relativization of norms. By the late 20th century, more direct theoretical forms emerged that re-examined legal phenomena from the perspective of social relations—such as Hohfeld’s schema of jural relations, Ian Macneil’s relational contract theory, Gidon Gottlieb’s relationalist legal theory, and Laura Poppo and Todd Zenger’s framework of relational governance. Even the theories of John Rawls’ justice as fairness and Lon Fuller’s legal philosophy, which have dominated mainstream international thought, came to emphasize reciprocity as a fundamental or ordering principle on the basis of pure proceduralism or procedural natural law. In effect, they sought to embed various social relations, feedback mechanisms, and non-reductionist methods into the normative system for safeguarding individual rights. Even more radical trends, such as critical legal studies and postmodern legal thought, made the negation of certainty, continuity, and universality the main theme of theory and practice. Thus, it can be seen that over the past hundred years or so, an idealist world-view that understands the world through concepts, language, and interactive relationships has swept across the globe and assumed a dominant position in thought. This great transformation in which idealism dissolved realism is called the “relativist turn” or the “relational turn,” and it seems to constitute a new Enlightenment movement.

From atomistic individualism to cooperative relationalism, this “relational turn”—although already foreshadowed in the early 20th century—did not reach its full scale and begin to permeate the world until the mid-1990s. The primary reason for the growing prevalence of relational thinking is the advancement of communication technology and quantum mechanics. In the early 1990s, U.S. Vice President Al Gore announced the “Information Highway” initiative. Against this backdrop, in 1994, the Netscape Navigator web browser was born, changing the world and triggering the first information technology war. Over the next two to three years, internet giants such as Yahoo, Amazon, and eBay emerged one after another. In 1996, John Perry Barlow published “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” Courts and legislatures also worked to promote interaction on the internet, thus ushering human society into the information age and gradually fostering a cyberculture and even an internet civilization. On the other hand, around 1995, Carlo Rovelli offered a relational interpretation of quantum mechanics from the perspective of loop quantum gravity, replacing atoms, protons, neutrons, and electrons as the protagonists of material structure or the essence of nature with a relational network of interactions and symmetries (see Pris, Reference Pris2019, pp. 102–107). At the end of 1996, Luo Jiachang, a Chinese researcher in the philosophy of science, expressed the basic pattern of the relational structure of reality using a binary function 【Y _r = f _r (x, r)】, where Y is the phenomenon, x represents the various variables that determine the generation of the phenomenon, f denotes the relationships among these variables, and r is the corresponding relational parameter.Footnote ² After 2022, large language models passed the Turing test in human-machine dialogue, which in fact also provides a relational definition of humans and intelligent agents. All of this has contributed to the global spread of a way of thinking centred on mutual relationships.

The second driving force behind the gradual intensification of the relational turn is the practical political-legal need to reconstruct basic consensus and achieve social integration. With the application and popularization of electronic settlement systems and encryption technologies based on internet infrastructure, the concept of the sovereign individual has begun to attract widespread attention (see Davidson and Rees-Mogg, Reference Davidson and Rees-Mogg1997). The so-called sovereign individual originally referred mainly to those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs with a Nietzschean “superman” temperament, but it also includes groups of digital anarchists who embrace libertarianism and various profit-seekers in cyberspace. Moreover, in the guerrilla warfare between individuals and the state, using encryption technology as a weapon, a so-called cypherpunk culture has also emerged.Footnote ³ In fact, Bitcoin and blockchain have made possible global e-commerce platforms, individually controlled currency circulation, and opportunity structures for instant cross-border asset transfers, thereby delivering an extremely powerful impact on a series of institutional mechanisms of nation-states, including taxation, social welfare based on fiscal redistribution, and legal regulation (see Ji, Reference Ji2023b). As a chain reaction, this has also led to the gradual erosion of democratic systems and the continuous expansion of the gap between the rich and the poor. On the other hand, Cass Sunstein has pointed out that online communication, subject to algorithmic intervention, leads to “information cocoons,” which can produce group polarization, cause “astonishing failures of deliberating groups,” and result in ethnic fragmentation (see Sunstein, Reference Sunstein2006). In response, people have attempted to use the self-organizing mechanisms of relational order to remedy the flaws in state order because the actions of the self and the other in a relationship not only point towards each other but also mutually constrain each other and continuously generate various special bonds. Such bonds certainly depend on the co-construction of self and other, but at the same time, they also generate a reality or virtual reality that transcends both parties.

The third factor making the relational turn a new Enlightenment movement is globalized risk. For example, the risks posed by nuclear energy utilization, climate warming, ecological destruction, disease outbreaks, and the rapid iteration of artificial intelligence (AI) are constantly increasing, exerting enormous impacts that cut across class and national boundaries and may even lead to irreversible and severe disasters that require the entire human society to address collectively. Under such circumstances, the atomistic, self-enclosed conception of the individual is clearly inadequate for the needs of risk society governance. Individuals must open themselves to others and engage in interaction with others; only thus can mechanisms of collaboration be established. If individuals always suspend their relations with others, then their relations with themselves will inevitably be suspended as well. This is precisely the core issue that the sociology of law should explore in the future. Therefore, in the conception of global governance systems, networks of mutual assistance and communities will become more important, and the spirit of reciprocity, public interest, and altruism should also become the fundamental principles of the new order.

The cornerstone of Asia’s legal cultural tradition is not exclusionary individualism but rather coordinative relationalism. Asian countries possess rich relational resources—for example, China is characterized as a “relation-based society,” Japan’s folk dispute resolution tends towards relational modes of dispute resolution, and Southeast Asian business practices exhibit features of relational capitalism, among others. In China, especially, the outcome of the ancient debate between Confucianism and Legalism resulted in the basic consensus that networked cooperation is more conducive to social harmony and economic success than individualistic competition. The fundamental formula of Confucian relationalism proceeds through the sequential operations of rectifying the mind, cultivating the self, regulating the family, governing the state, and bringing peace to the world, thereby embedding and internalizing relationships within the individual, generating trust situations and reciprocal effects, and operating both relations and power through the feedback mechanism of “reciprocity (bao).”Footnote ⁴ The matrix of Chinese-style relations developed from this is the family—it is the family that truly unites the social and the human, law and morality (see Chʻü, Reference Ch’ü1961; Qu, Reference Qu1981). Through the composite structure of “the parallel operation of ritual and law” and “affection, reason, and law” (qing-li-fa), along with mechanisms of repeated adjustment between different norms and claims, this interpersonal interactive relationship has been continuously embedded in the legal system.

Observing China’s empirical materials from the perspective of the sociology of law, the Indian-American scholar Prasenjit Duara, in 1988, extracted the concept of variable culture-power relations from survey data on civil customary law in rural North China during the early 20th century (see Duara, Reference Duara1988). As early as 1948, the renowned Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong began using the concept of “differential mode of association” (chaxu geju) to articulate the relational distance from blood ties to geographical ties, the concentric-circle structure of relationships, and the relational dynamics of interaction and adjustment between the public and the private (see Fei, Reference Fei2005, p. 49). In such interactive relationships and fields, we can, in fact, vaguely perceive the kind of realm described by Jürgen Habermas: the lifeworld, as the transcendental condition of social processes, first leads to mutual understanding and then to communicative action. An important legal proposition derived from China’s practical experience is that relational thinking inevitably leads to a realist view of law, which tends to reject the notion of fictional elemental facts because people believe that true social facts can only be understood and recognised within concrete social relationships.Footnote ⁵

The prevalence of relational approaches has led legal institutions to exhibit characteristics markedly different from those of the axiomatic system and reductionist treatment of modern legal dogmatics. Legal decisions are less about asserting claims based on an existing system of rights and making black-and-white judgements than about an adjustment process that seeks various relational equilibria through bargaining in social exchange, iterative dialogues of justification, and mutually acceptable compromises, taking the subjective satisfaction of the relevant parties as an important criterion. This process of negotiation and adjustment is evidently uncertain, its outcomes are typically irreducible and plural, and along the chain of reasoning, it sometimes presents ineffable grey zones. However, the enduring relationship itself manifests as a stabilised form of consent or consensus regarding a series of exchanges, gaining effectiveness through social sanctions in long-term play, and thus possesses a contractual character in a broad sense. In this sense, it can also be said that the foundation or legitimating basis of the legal order that has been embedded in relationships is the principle of contract.

This contractual principle manifests in the field of criminal procedure as various mechanisms in China that have emphasised since ancient times “willing consent to end litigation” (qing gan xi song), “written statements of admission and defense” (fu bian zhuang), the allowance of “recantation” (fan yi) of one’s own confession, as well as, in contemporary China, “judicial complaints” (shensu) and “petitions to higher authorities” (shangfang) that permit challenges to the validity of final judgements—all of which are institutional designs that rely on consent as the basis for case resolution.Footnote ⁶ In the realm of civil law, this contractual principle is reflected in the continuity between statutory provisions and private agreements (see Terada, Reference Terada and Mizoguchi1994, pp. 69–130), the supplementary role of local covenants and community regulations (xianggui minyue) in the legal order, the phenomenon of dianquan (pawn rights), which continuously fractalizes and multiplies rights between “conditional sale” (huo mai) and “absolute sale” (jue mai) (e.g. “pledging land for loans,” “remote pledge,” “dead sale with living features,” “dead contract with living signature,” “sale with a tail,” “purchase without severance,” and “severance without death”), the “shareholding cooperative system” (gufen hezuo zhi) that emerged during the era of “Reform and Opening Up,” and the so-called land-for-security practice under Article 42(2) of the 2007 Property Law that allowed for the trading of qualifying entitlements,Footnote ⁷ as well as the continued recognition under Article 1130 of the 2020 Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China of the significant influence of support relationships and the economic circumstances of interested parties on statutory inheritance, and under Article 1158 the continued recognition of the folk practice of legacy-support agreements and the validity of their notarized documents, among others.

For example, the “Twenty Data Measures” (i.e. the Opinions on Building a Data Foundation System to Better Leverage the Role of Data Elements) issued by China at the end of 2022, in response to the difficulties of determining data property rights and pricing, proposed a solution of “separating three rights”: rights to hold data resources, rights to use and process data, and rights to operate data products. In this, we can observe an important aspect of the influence of relationships on legal rights: the phenomenon of the “bundle of rights” (quanli shu), that is, the disaggregation and recombination of rights. A theoretical framework quite similar to this line of thought can be found in the judicial reasoning doctrine of the American jurist Wesley Hohfeld. Hohfeld grasped the concept of rights precisely from the perspective of a bundle of relationships, disaggregating rights into four groups of eight different factors—rights and duties, privileges and no-rights, powers and liabilities, and immunities and disabilities—and combining them at the levels of both correlative and opposite relationships to form a matrix of a bundle of rights (see Hohfeld, Reference Hohfeld2007a, Reference Hohfeld2007b; Hohfeld, Reference Hohfeld2009; Shen, Reference Shen1990; Wang, Reference Wang2019). In his view, this matrix of jural relations is the “lowest common denominator” of all other legal concepts and their relationships. Returning to the three-right separation model of contemporary China’s “Twenty Data Measures,” one can find that through the decoupling and recombination of different jural relations—such as the data holder’s authorization of the right to use and process data, the combination of the right of use and the right of operation, and the reconfiguration of rights through data exchanges—more flexible and efficient methods of data transactions can be formed.

Another important aspect of the influence of relationships on legal rights is the embedding of reciprocity into the existing system of rights, which adds flexibility to the recognition, enforcement, and protection of rights based on the parties’ free will, creating a phenomenon of “soft rights” through ex post adjustments and interest balancing along the temporal dimension. The goal and result of embedding reciprocity into rights is to alter the zero-sum relationship between rights and duties, seeking through win-win methods to adjust the manner, content, time limit, and degree of sanction in the performance of duties, thereby also redefining rights. This approach, highly characteristic of China, is in fact also of universal significance. For example, in the sociological jurisprudence of P. Selznick, the concept of rights embedded with reciprocity was also proposed, which stands in sharp contrast to the Luhmannian conception of rights based on the zero-sum game of the parties (see Rokumoto, Reference Rokumoto1986, pp. 140–147). Although rights embedded with reciprocity cannot be equated with utilitarian conceptions of rights, they nonetheless involve the provision of public goods and the activation of mechanisms for social cooperation, much like Rawls’s new theory of justice takes reciprocity as the justifying ground for the difference principle. Therefore, criticism and correction of violations of reciprocity can be understood both as a moral judgement and as a form of rights consciousness. Given that the embedding of reciprocity inevitably introduces a degree of uncertainty into the system of rights, it is necessary to impose appropriate limitations, setting a proper scope and evaluative criteria for ex post adjustments of rights.

Because the legal system needs to process and integrate embedded heterogeneous relationships, it should also establish and operate two types of institutions that do not exist in the continental European model of the modern rule-of-law order. One is a system for reviewing the plural equilibria of social exchange and the propriety of invoking informal rules, which manifests primarily in the emphasis on supervisory power and the ex post accountability of judges for erroneous cases. In today’s digital state, technological means for review and tracking management are undergoing rapid change, enabling a high degree of integration between the process-oriented thinking of supervision and the outcome-oriented thinking of accountability. The other is a system of intermediaries that reconciles contradictions between norms and corrects relational imbalances, including various intermediate terms and transitional links, as well as relational dispute resolution methods such as autonomous negotiation, private settlement, and different types of mediation. This creates the advantage of law as a medium, gradually surpassing law as a structure.

It is not difficult to imagine that the continued operation of the above two institutions will inevitably strengthen the reflective rationality and feedback mechanisms of the legal system, making trial and error, learning, reflection, fine-tuning, and restructuring the norm in legislation and law enforcement, while in the judiciary it will also lead to a problem-solving orientation and continuous exploration of better alternative solutions, thereby promoting informal and pluralistic dispute resolution mechanisms. As the law’s capacity to handle relationships increases, its ability to adapt to the social environment will also improve correspondingly, rendering the legal structure more robustly stable and enduring. In other words, through the interaction between law and relationships, various heterogeneous factors are absorbed into the system, and the law develops a flexible structure, yet qualitative leaps become relatively difficult. Therefore, in a relation-based society, the transformation of the legal system must follow a gradual path, accumulating the power for structural transformation through micro-changes brought about by the interplay of multiple forces.

Socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics can be essentially understood as the restructuring of traditional relational configurations into another form—namely transforming particularistic ties and ritual as a mode of conduct into collectivist cooperation and communication that promotes mutual understanding (see Gold, Reference Gold1985, pp. 657–675; Walder, Reference Walder1986), from the formal rules of “three cardinal guides and five constant virtues” and “order between superior and inferior” to the dialectics and the art of overall planning presented by Mao Zedong in On the Ten Major Relationships (1956) and On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (1957) (see Li, Wu, and Zheng, Reference Li, Wu and Zheng1978). Alternatively, it can be described as a transformation from the inherent mode in which “the individual is premised on and generated by relationships” (mediated by the “organization man” under the universalistic unit system) (see Whyte, Reference Whyte2020) to the contemporary mode in which “relationships are premised on and constructed by the individual.” Particularly over the past three decades, following the gradual digital transformation of society and even the achievement of full digital coverage, cyberspace has further enhanced the characteristics of the Chinese people as “relational beings.” Almost every individual action leaves countless relational traces, almost every ordering principle embeds multilayered and diverse relationality, and almost every governance measure can be largely attributed to the comprehensive balancing of adjustments among relationships. This necessitates the further reinforcement of process-oriented thinking in the institutional operation of the digital state, fully leveraging the role of neo-proceduralism and closely integrating fair legal procedures with fair technical procedures (see Ji, Reference Ji2023a). In fact, only by adhering to the principle of procedural fairness can we effectively prevent such common malpractices in a relation-based society as the moral decline brought about by “hypocritical deference” (xiangyuan) and the hollowing out of the rule of law caused by “backroom deals,” thereby preserving the purity and dignity of relational thinking.

In conclusion, amidst the global relational turn, it is necessary for us to re-examine the relational structures, ordering principles, and their evolution in Asia. We must critically assess certain negative aspects of traditional societies while continuing to promote modernizing institutional reforms and also identify positive factors conducive to knowledge innovation and governance innovation, recombining them in light of the needs of the times. Examined from the perspective of a relational sociology of law, the human nature emphasized by modernization can only find its proper place within the realm of relationships because discussing individual rights apart from concrete contexts and situations is of little significance. It is on the basis of this understanding that we decided to organize the special issue on “The Relational Turn in Law: Practices and Implications from Asia” to promote related exploration and discussion. After issuing the call for papers in the spring of 2025, we received abstracts or full texts for a total of 17 submissions from countries such as China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, India, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia. Following an anonymous review process, five papers were selected for inclusion in this special issue.

Professor Matthias Vanhullebusch of the Faculty of Law at Hasselt University, Belgium, argues that in a multipolar world, international order needs to be restructured through a relational approach; otherwise, it will be difficult to maintain and strengthen the legitimacy and enforceability of international legal norms. Since 2016, he has published a series of papers discussing global relational governance, conducting in-depth comparative analyses of the advantages and disadvantages of rule-based governance versus relationship-based governance in the field of international law, and advocating for a “Theory on the Relational Normativity of International Law (TORNIL).” To date, sociological studies of law on interaction have often focused on domestic or comparative law, but Professor Vanhullebusch has further extended the scope of research to the field of international law, which is an important contribution to relational jurisprudence. This paper astutely and correctly points out that, in complex network structures, the quality of relationships depends primarily on trust, recognition, and reciprocity. Here, reciprocity refers not only to a state of mutuality but also includes social exchanges that differ from market exchanges, as well as public rationality and planned rationality that disregard immediate gains and losses in pursuit of long-term win-win cooperation. Therefore, the author advocates resolving international disputes through negotiation, bargaining, and mediation, seeking norms for dispute resolution from the relationships between the states concerned, and thereby forming new norms of international law through the process of relational adjustment. This conceptualizes the international legal order as a generative process continuously constructed through interaction—which is precisely the essence of the relational approach.

Against the backdrop of the digital transformation of Asian societies, the paper by two young Indian scholars, Ravi Kant and Raneeta Pal, focuses on human-computer interaction and relational protocols. According to their definition, a relational protocol refers to the normative system of human-AI communication formed within the framework of collaborative developmental AI systems. Thanks to the relational database model developed by Turing Award winner Edgar Frank Codd, we already know that data achieves optimized management and querying through relationality, data also generates value in application through relationality, and algorithms influence the social environment through relationality. The essence of large language models and multimodal large models lies in the way AI improves its accuracy through the expansion of neural networks and shapes itself through multilayered relational network self-learning and in-context learning, thereby forming an automated ecosystem. Thus, it can also be said that AI transforms society into a distributed collection of relationships, characterized fundamentally by networking and circularity. Research findings from a “naming game” experiment published on May 14, 2025, in Science Advances by a research team from City St George’s, University of London, among others, further confirm that interactions between AI systems also produce spontaneous convergence phenomena, forming unified “social norms” through conformity effects in the absence of central coordination. However, as long as a committed minority comprising only 10% of the AI agents persistently intervenes with different content, it can alter the outcome of public choice at a certain critical point, leading to innovation in social norms (see Ashery, Aiello, and Baronchelli, Reference Ashery, Aiello and Baronchelli2025). Here, the model context protocol (MCP) and the agent network protocol (ANP), which serve as AI tools and industry open standards, further promote interactions between AI systems, enhancing the relational principles (neural representations) and network effects of digital space through methods such as providing multi-network content via contractual consensus, strengthening interoperability, and programme coupling. It is precisely against this backdrop that this paper, from the perspectives of relational sociology and comparative law, and using cases from India, China, Japan, and Singapore in public services and dispute resolution, explores how legal institutions and socio-cultural practices such as collectivism and multilingualism influence such “artificial communication.”Footnote ⁸ The authors point out that for the successful coexistence of humans and AI and human-AI dialogue in Asia, a legal framework that emphasizes relational trust and mutual adaptation rather than mere technical efficiency is needed in order to achieve a balance of various values and strengthen the social cooperation system. The significance of this paper lies in its presentation of the evolved version of Asian relationalism in the age of AI and its provision of comparable analytical examples for the interaction between relationships and law.

Chinese young scholar Chen Xiyi’s paper chooses a very interesting and specific topic: the relational trend in the determination and attribution of liability for damages in the context of smart healthcare. In her view, existing legal mechanisms for assigning liability are characterized by a subject-object dichotomy, a linear understanding of causation, and the attribution of fault to specific individual subjects. When AI is applied to clinical decision-making, a series of new problems inevitably arise due to human-AI interaction, algorithmic black boxes, and the emergent nature of decision-making structures. Therefore, the allocation of risks and the assumption of liability for damages should adopt a relational approach, establishing a legal framework for relational responsibility. Judicial determinations should focus on the process of interaction, abandon an outcome-oriented way of thinking, and emphasize the restoration and future development of the physician-patient relationship and corresponding social relations. Given that the basic unit of decision-making is human-AI interaction, holding parties accountable based on the duty to explain faces technical obstacles. Therefore, it is necessary to appropriately reduce the plaintiff’s burden of proof; make medical institutions the pivotal point for assuming responsibility; clarify the respective responsibilities of medical personnel, technology providers, and others through communication; and pursue internal reimbursement while simultaneously safeguarding the patient’s right to informed consent. This paper argues that a relational accountability mechanism design is conducive to enhancing trust between physicians and patients, as well as trust between humans and AI, achieving a balance among different values, and fostering a healthy ecosystem for tort law in the era of AI. Here, relationships can also be understood as communication and the media of communication, forming mutually referential relationships within various communicative processes.

Another young Chinese scholar, Ma Xinyi, draws on the original analytical framework proposed in 1974 by the recently deceased renowned American legal sociologist Marc Galanter—namely the different win rates and compliance rates between “repeat players” and “one-shot players” in relational adjudication—and takes the complex relationship between China’s judicial system and technology giants as a central thread through which to examine the adjudicative practices of China’s internet courts. She finds that relational governance in Chinese courts extends beyond individual case adjudication to encompass systemic compliance recommendations, thereby integrating legal risk prevention into the daily practices of enterprises. While the general public tends to believe that technology giants enjoy potential preferential treatment in local courts, in fact, judicial recommendations—non-binding guidance issued by Chinese courts—are highly complied with by technology giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, and JD.com. In my view, the interest of this paper lies in its revelation of the following paradox of relationship and procedure: it goes without saying that fair procedure provides an extremely important safeguard for individuals in an atomized state under modern rule-of-law states and also serves as the basis for legitimizing the coercive force of norms. Yet communication, negotiation, and coordination within procedure themselves also bring into sharper relief the forms and conditions of human interaction and, to a certain extent, allow the golden rule of reciprocity, as well as broader relationship-adjustment mechanisms than those between repeat players and the courts, and even rationalized institutional reforms, to enter into the purview of a procedure-based theory of social justice and procedural natural law.Footnote ⁹

It can be inferred, therefore, that there exist certain connecting points and conversion mechanisms between legal order and relational order. Between procedure and relationship, which may appear incompatible, there is, in fact, a complementary and mutually reinforcing positive correlation. It is a procedure that transforms doubly contingent interactions into rule-governed interactions, thereby allowing the ideas and modes of behaviour of the modern rule of law to be woven into relational networks and circulate continuously within crisscrossing interactions. It is worth noting here that a recent relevant study by Professor Takashi Iida of the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law is highly valuable. Using an electronic statutory retrieval system and network analysis methods, he empirically analyses the referential relationships among various legal norms and quantifies and visualizes the structural transformation of civil legal relations over the 20-year period from 2002 to 2022. Here, the main indicators for measuring the characteristics of legal relational networks are the frequency of legal citations, node density, clustering groups, centrality indicators, and so forth. The findings indicate that against the backdrop of increasing diversification and complexity of social relations, law has shown a trend towards shifting from substantive norms to procedural norms—namely the “proceduralization of law.” This means that when social relations become more fluid and relative, it is difficult to resolve the problems arising from such relations by establishing uniform legal rules external to them; consequently, it becomes necessary to attach importance to the negotiations and judgements of the parties and stakeholders involved and to focus regulation on processes in various contexts (see Iida, Reference Iida2023, pp. 3–25). This empirical paper clearly reveals the catalytic role of interactive relations in process-oriented thinking and the development of legal procedures and also demonstrates that the principle of procedural justice in modern law can play a comparatively significant mediating role between relational order and legal order. To a certain extent, it also provides corroborating evidence for Ma Xinyi’s findings.

Finally, my own thesis develops the idea of “digital relationalism,” which differs from the said “digital constitutionalism.” In the era of Web 3.0, large-scale AI models, and AI agents, the metaverse has emerged as a prominent arena for digital transformation and institutional innovation across Asian societies. Since November 2021, China has begun charting new paths for future economic development, with the industrial metaverse elevated to a national strategy. A year later, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released the “Metaverse + Artificial Intelligence” action plan. In October 2022, the launch of the online virtual reality (VR) game Sword Art Online (SAO) in Tokyo prompted consumers to queue for purchases. In February 2023, ten Japanese technology companies, including Fujitsu and Mitsubishi, signed an agreement with the largest financial group, Mizuho, to create a metaverse economic zone. South Korea’s largest platform company, Naver, offers the smartphone-based avatar social network service ZEPETO, reaching 30 million Asian users, 70% of whom are women, with virtual fashion goods transactions reaching 1.6 billion. This prompted the Italian luxury brand BVLGARI to establish an exclusive virtual space and pop-up store in September 2022. Vietnam’s popular online game Axie Infinity used non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as a lever for inclusive finance, forming a play-to-earn (P2E) business and lifestyle model. Observing the metaverse in Asia from the perspective of the sociology of law, it is noteworthy that the superposition of factors such as blockchain technology, smart contract platforms, crypto assets, and internet trust is at play. On the one hand, the convergence forms the self-sovereign identity (SSI) of online users or what William Rees-Mogg called “the Sovereign Individual.” On the other hand, individuals in virtual communities must possess the flexibility to open up to others to achieve social cooperation.

In this sense, it can be said that the metaverse constitutes a sovereign individuals’ relational network or field, thereby creating a kind of Shangri-la where one can say, “What does imperial power have to do with me!” Here, users can declare, “My space, my rules.” They can freely choose how to live, redesign themselves through different avatars and dressing styles, and strengthen communication between people—even achieving a zero-distance virtual relationship—by transcending time and space without being constrained by real-world conditions, thereby inadvertently triggering an identity revolution and a corresponding social interaction revolution. Since it excludes attribute labels such as age, gender, and identity that affect communication in the real world and can further eliminate certain actual interference factors through individual virtual avatars, people can engage in more essential dialogues and exchanges equally and freely, forming purer, more lasting, and even more intimate social relationships. The thin and inefficient interpersonal relationships existing in the real world can be enriched and developed in the metaverse, where the power index is lower. Various obstacles and shackles that hinder the direct collision of souls can also be eliminated through the conditional settings of digital avatars and imaginary scenarios. More importantly, the experience of individual control over interpersonal relationships is vastly different, as social media grants people a stronger sense of self-control and satisfaction. Here, we can discover that the mode of order in the metaverse is actually consistently permeated by a principle based on free and flexible interactive relationships between individuals, which needs to be examined and understood through a relational perspective. In the metaverse, individuals are less like social beings (homo sociologicus) and more like somewhat postmodern players (homo ludens) (see Huizinga, Reference Huizinga2002; Frissen, de Mul and Raessens, Reference Frissen, de Mul, Raessens, Thissen, Zwijnenberg and Zijlmans2013, pp. 75–92). Therefore, the operational mode and interaction mechanism of the metaverse adopt a purer, more playful, and chance-based game paradigm, and the game rules formed by these highly autonomous interactive relationships are precisely the underlying logic leading to the innovation of the legal order. From this perspective, to examine the metaverse phenomenon, it is instructive to revisit the concept of “social game” (Gesellschaft) proposed long ago by Georg Simmel.

In the context of Web 3.0, internet protocols are essentially purely procedural. Anyone operating according to the same rules will achieve the same results. To ensure that programmes can run continuously without interruption, a mechanism design has been further adopted to embed various tokens into the programmes. In a sense, it can be said that tokens are part of the internet protocol or smart contract and that holding tokens means holding a part of the protocol or contract as a credential to enjoy public goods. In other words, the reciprocal contractual relationship is embedded in the procedural requirements of public rationality, forming a duality in the legitimization mechanism. From the perspective of real political and legal systems, the essence of the principle of reciprocity emphasized by relational order is equality, which inevitably promotes horizontal interaction or a “tit-for-tat” feedback mechanism among different subjects. Thus, the opportunity and rationale for the rise of the “relational egalitarianism” trend in the network structures of the private sphere and the workplace can be discovered. In fact, it is precisely through relational egalitarianism’s series of critiques regarding the unfair distribution of factors such as resources, wealth, ability, talent, and luck, as well as the flaws in distributive justice theory (see Anderson, Reference Anderson1999, pp. 287–337; Anderson, Reference Anderson2010, pp. 1–23) that the asymmetric relationships in modern institutional design have become visible. Consequently, embedding intersubjective interaction into law and achieving interpersonal equality through simulated democratic activities in cyberspace have become an emerging political and legal movement.

In the digital age, although humans inhabit the same Earth, they also live in different metaverses of their own choosing and can selectively design their lifestyles. This choice is, of course, free, but the corresponding responsibility must also be borne by the individual so that people make responsible choices. Since responsibility is closely linked to choice, those who make choices can naturally be held accountable, and accountability constitutes the cornerstone of the legal order. Therefore, freedom of choice and individual responsibility are the most fundamental value anchors in metaverse governance and in dealing with risks and uncertainties. It goes without saying that this responsibility system is compatible with the relational structure of distributed autonomous organizations in virtual space. However, it can also easily lead to pluralist ignorance caused by diversity, forming erroneous perceptions and beliefs, which can allow situations or behaviours that few people actually endorse. Therefore, to strengthen the burden of responsibility on the basis of mutual understanding, it is necessary to promote a spirit of freedom that is oriented towards others, embedded in intersubjectivity and publicity, and emphasizes interactive relationships and overlapping consensus. Under the condition of multiple worlds, how to promote cross-border communication and how to establish “corridor-style institutions” become very important legal topics. In my view, the “Guernsey Purpose Trust” related to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) and the 2023 Utah state tax law aimed at DAOs are good examples of such “corridor-style institutions.” Originally, events occurring in the metaverse would not affect the real world and vice versa. However, digital twin technology allows phenomena in the metaverse to be linked to their real-world twins, enabling them to analyse, predict, and even influence the real world, leading to co-evolution. Therefore, how to coordinate the distinctly different ordering principles between virtual space and real society and how to choose the combination of the two have become important issues that the legal community, especially judicial and enforcement departments, cannot avoid. In this sense, we can indeed understand the metaverse as an interface revolution between virtual space and the real world, providing an opportunistic structure for the mutual generation, complementarity, and mutual strengthening of the virtual and the real. From the perspective of institutions and norms, this also constitutes an interface revolution of law, requiring the renegotiation of the social contract and the achievement of basic consensus.

In summary, we can find that the ordering mechanism of the metaverse is based on the interactive relationships between subjects, achieving equilibrium through games and forming a networked structure, which belongs to a relation-oriented type of order. Under the condition where the virtual and real coexist and the virtual strengthens the real, how the relational order and the analogue legal order mutually influence each other is an important research topic in jurisprudence, especially in the sociology of law. As pointed out earlier, the relational order and complex rules of the metaverse are constrained by procedural codes and smart contracts. In fact, procedures and contracts are also the dual tracks of the legal order’s operation in the real world and can serve as the main bridge for cross-border communication between parallel universes. However, it is necessary to particularly emphasize that in the metaverse, the concept of sovereignty has undergone an extremely profound change—not only will conflicts between multiple sovereignties arise in cyberspace, but individuals are also considered to possess sovereignty, although this autonomy is constrained by their relationality with others. Under a market system where services replace goods as the universal object of exchange, this is often manifested as “consumer sovereignty” or “user sovereignty.” What kind of chain reaction this subversive transformation from state sovereignty to individual sovereignty will trigger in the legal system of the digital age and whether it will intensify the relational turn of law are a series of issues that we should attach great importance to.