Prominent Legal Scholar to Speak on Legal Reform in Japan

October 21, 2013

miyazawa3.jpg
UC Hastings Law Professor Setsuo Miyazawa

The Department of Sociology and the East Asian Studies Program presents:

Japan’s Legal Reform and Its Socio-Political Significance and Legal Ramification in Today’s East Asia

By UC Hastings Law Professor Setsuo Miyazawa

Friday, October 25, 2-4 p.m.

301 College Eight, UC Santa Cruz

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many countries in East and Central Asia have gone through dramatic legal transformations. UC Hastings Law Professor Setsuo Miyazawa will talk about Japan’s recent legal reform and its socio-political significance and legal ramification in East Asia.  He has been highly active in the promotion of judicial reform in Japan and is the most prominent proponent of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law school. Given the recent significant judicial reform in East Asia, he has founded the Collaborative Research Network in East Asian Law & Society, which now has its own journal, Asian Journal of Law & Society, published by Cambridge University Press.  He has also been active in the Law & Society Association, twice serving on its Board of Trustees.

Professor Miyazawa’s research interests include police and criminal justice, legal ethics, public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice. He has published and edited more than a dozen books, including Policing in Japan (1992), which received the Distinguished Book Award of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. Professor Setsuo Miyazawa received LL.B., LL.M., and S.J.D. from Hokkaido University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. He has been a full-time faculty member at Hokkaido University, Kobe University, Waseda University, Omiya Law School, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. He also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of York University (Canada), the University of Washington, Harvard University (Mitsubishi Visiting Professor of Japanese Legal Studies), UC Berkeley (Sho Sato Visiting Professor), UCLA, New York University (Global Law Faculty), the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham University.