Recorded on November 4, 2020.
COVID and Constitutions: COVID’s Challenge to Japan and Korea
About the Event:
This is the second talk in our three-part series, COVID and Constitutions, which explores how the current pandemic challenges national and international legal orderings. This week, Professors Eric Feldman and Haksoo Ko talk about the stresses that COVID has posed to the constitutions and legal systems in Japan and South Korea, respectively. In Japan, the central and prefectural governments tussled over which should take emergency actions in a public health crisis. In South Korea, the government aroused privacy concerns by sharing tracing public data with the public. Discussant Neysun Mahboubi will share the insights he gleaned by organizing a special series of essays in The Regulatory Review, “Comparing Nations’ Responses to COVID-19,” in which scholars from more than 20 countries wrote about their governments’ regulatory actions. Mahboubi argues that the record so far “raises uncomfortable questions about governance models in the face of public health or other crises.”
Related Publications by Panelists:
Information Technology–Based Tracing Strategy in Response to COVID-19 in South Korea—Privacy Controversies by Haksoo Ko
Did Japan’s Lenient Lockdown Conquer the Coronavirus? by Eric Feldman
Comparative Administrative Law Matters in the Fight Against COVID-19 by Neysun Mahboubi
About the Speakers:
Eric Feldman holds the Heimbold Chair in International Law and also is a professor of medical ethics and health policy and deputy dean for international programs at the University of Pennsylvania. His expertise is in Japanese law, comparative public health law, torts, and law and society. His books and articles explore the comparative dimensions of rights, dispute resolution, and legal culture, often in the context of urgent policy issues, including the regulation of smoking, electronic cigarettes, HIV/AIDS, and natural and nuclear disasters. Feldman has twice been a Fulbright Scholar in Japan and has received grants and fellowships from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the American Bar Association, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others.
Haksoo Ko is professor of law at Seoul National University School of Law in Seoul, Korea. He primarily teaches topics in law and economics as well as in data privacy and artificial intelligence law. He regularly sits on various advisory boards and committees for the Korean government, legislature, and judiciary. He currently serves as president of the Asian Law and Economics Association; president of the Korean Association for AI and Law; director of the SNU Asia-Pacific Law Institute; and associate director of SNU AI Institute. In 2017, he launched the SNU AI Policy Initiative and currently serves as its co-director. He had visitor appointments at UC Berkeley, University of Hamburg, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and National University of Singapore. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Seoul National University and received both J.D. and Ph.D. (Economics) degrees from Columbia University in New York, USA.
Neysun Mahboubi is a research scholar of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania and a lecturer in law at Penn Law School. He hosts the CSCC Podcast, and is one of the project leaders for the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations. In June, he published an article, “Comparative Administrative Law Matters in the Fight Against COVID-19,” as part of a series that he helped organize in the Penn Regulatory Review to examine the administrative law and regulatory dimensions of nations’ responses to COVID. His research interests are in the areas of administrative law, comparative law, and Chinese law, and his current writing focuses on the development of modern Chinese administrative law.