This event was recorded on September 27, 2023.
About the event
The 1980 Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction, now in force in 103 countries, was adopted to prevent a parent from unlawfully removing or retaining a child across an international border. Joining the Convention and accepting its fundamental premises has been difficult for some Asian countries, including Japan. It has forced a shift in mindset about the respective custodial rights of parents in countries with different cultural and societal norms from many Western countries. Two leading experts on the Convention, Yuko Nishitani, professor of law at Kyoto University in Japan, and Linda Silberman, NYU professor of law, will discuss these and other challenges to the operation of the Convention in Japan and the United States as well as other recent global trends.
About the speakers
Yuko Nishitani is a professor of international private and business law at Kyoto University in Japan. She was a global professor at NYU School of Law in spring 2023, and also has been a visiting professor at Duke and in Zurich, Lausanne, Brescia, Louvain-la-Neuve, Tel Aviv, and Taiwan. Professor Nishitani is a titular member of the International Academy of Comparative Law. She was a director of studies (English) and lecturer (French) at the Hague Academy of International Law and is its vice-president since May 2023. She served on several Legislative Committees in Japan and represented the Japanese government at the Hague Conference on Private International Law.
Check here to read Professor Nishitani’s book chapter, “International child abduction in Asia.”
Linda Silberman is the Clarence D. Ashley professor of law emerita at NYU School of Law. Her scholarship covers a wide variety of domestic and transnational subject areas: conflict of laws, domestic and comparative procedure, transnational litigation (in particular judicial jurisdiction and judgments recognition), international arbitration, and international child abduction. She is a member of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Private International Law and has been a member of several US State Department delegations to the Hague Conference on Private International Law focusing on cross-border family law issues. In summer 2021, Professor Silberman delivered the Hague Academy General Course on Private International law.
About the moderator
Katherine Wilhelm is executive director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, and editor of the institute’s online essay series, USALI Perspectives. She is an expert on China’s legal system, public interest law organizations, and civil society. She joined USALI in August 2019 after returning from nearly three decades of residence in Asia, where she split her career between law and journalism. Most recently she was the legal program officer at the Ford Foundation’s China office, where she funded Chinese legal advocacy NGOs and university-based legal research and education programs. Before that, she directed the Beijing office of Yale Law School’s China Law Center, which implements law reform projects in partnership with government, academia and civil society. Ms. Wilhelm also practiced corporate law in the Beijing office of a leading US law firm. Before beginning her career in law, she was a journalist. She reported for The Associated Press from Beijing, Hong Kong, and Hanoi, and for the Far Eastern Economic Review from Hong Kong and Shanghai. Her work has been published in leading newspapers around the world. She was a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1996-97. She holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, a master’s degree in East Asian studies from Harvard University, a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and a bachelor’s degree in history from Niagara University.