Japan’s Legal Reform and Its
Socio
Socio--Political Significance and
Legal Ramification in
Today’s East Asia
UC Hastings Law
Professor Setsuo Miyazawa
October 25, 2 pm to 4 pm on Friday
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.
Co-sponsored by the Department of
Sociology and East Asian Studies at
University of California Santa Cruz.
For more information, please see: sociology.ucsc.edu or astasianstudies.ucsc.edu.