The Importance of US-Japan Scholarly Exchanges

US-Japan Short Takes Series

Date: Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Time: 8-9 a.m. ET

On zoom only

About this event

One of the missions of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute is to facilitate scholarly exchanges between the US and East Asian countries, with Japan as one of our most important partners. USALI is part of a wider effort at NYU School of Law to be an international law school and foster scholarly conversation across borders. Pursuing these goals takes constant effort. Technology makes it easier for scholars around the world to read each other’s work, but we still face the barriers of language, culture, and divergent perspectives. Now as the world is increasingly fractured by geopolitical rivalries, might this ideal recede even further? Our extraordinary panel of discussants with a range of perspectives on international academic exchanges will talk about why scholarly exchanges matter, how we can incentivize them, and what we lose when scholarship becomes parochial, with a focus on the case of Japan-US exchanges.

About the speakers

Noriyuki Shikata has been Cabinet secretary for public affairs under Prime Minister Fumio Kishida since 2021. Before that, he was assistant minister/director general of the Economic Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA). His other prior positions include: envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, deputy chief of mission at the Embassy of Japan in China; deputy director general of the Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau in MOFA; political minister in the Embassy of Japan in the UK; director of global communications in the Prime Minister’s Office, and director of the divisions handling economic treaties, North America, international press, and status of US forces. He has been a visiting professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Law/Public Policy, and an associate in Harvard University’s Program on U.S.-Japan Relations. He holds a B.A. in law from Kyoto University and master of public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Setsuo Miyazawa is a legal sociologist and professor emeritus of law at Kobe University and senior director emeritus at the Center for East Asian Legal Studies at the University of California College of Law, San Francisco. He has been a full-time faculty member at Hokkaido University, Waseda University, Omiya Law School, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan, before reaching mandatory retirement at Aoyama Gakuin in 2016. He has taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of York University (Canada), the University of Washington, Harvard, UC Berkeley, US San Francisco, UCLA, NYU, the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham. Professor Miyazawa’s research interests include police and criminal justice, legal ethics and public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice. He has published or edited more than a dozen books in Japanese and English. He has been active promoting judicial reform in Japan, and was a prominent proponent of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law schools. He also has been active in the Law and Society Association (LSA) in the US, twice serving on its Board of Trustees. Professor Miyazawa co-founded the Collaborative Research Network 33 in East Asian Law and Society in the LSA in 2008 and received the International Scholarship Prize from the LSA in 2014. He also received the Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award and the Legacy Award from the LSA in 2021. He co-founded the Section on East Asian Law and Society in the Association of American Law Schools in 2015 and was founding president of the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) in 2016 and 2017. He received LL.B., LL.M., and S.J.D. from Hokkaido University and M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in sociology from Yale.

Troy A. McKenzie is dean of NYU School of Law and the Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law. He served as faculty co-director of the Institute of Judicial Administration for over six years, as well as faculty co-director of the Center on Civil Justice. His research and teaching interests include bankruptcy, civil procedure, complex litigation, and the federal courts. He studies litigation and the institutions that shape it—particularly complex litigation that is resolved through the class action, bankruptcy, and other forms of aggregation. He is also a member of the National Bankruptcy Conference and the Council of the American Law Institute. From 2011-15, McKenzie served, by appointment of the chief justice, as a reporter to the Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules of the Judicial Conference of the United States. From 2015-17, he served in the US Department of Justice as a deputy assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. McKenzie earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1997 from Princeton University and a law degree in 2000 from NYU.

Carolina van der Mensbrugghe is associate director of the NYU School of Law’s Public Interest Law Center and has worked as a human rights attorney both in the United States and abroad. She currently volunteers as a co-supervisor of the Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic at Fordham Law School, where she co-supervises projects that address human rights violations and intersectional gender justice issues. Before joining PILC, she worked as a US Human Rights Fellow for the Center for Reproductive Rights. She also worked at Amnesty International Japan, where she focused on designing and implementing a comprehensive gender and sexuality human rights educational materials targeting secondary schools and universities. She received a JD from Fordham University School of Law, where she was a Crowley Scholar for International Law & Justice and studied for one semester abroad at Waseda Law School in Tokyo. Her clinical work included criminal justice reform efforts to improve conditions for prisoners on death row in Japan and capacity building training on human rights for both sex worker rights activists in Mauritius and new female members of parliament in Myanmar.

About the moderator

Bruce Aronson is senior advisor at the Japan Center of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute and an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He has been a tenured professor of law at universities in the United States (Creighton University) and Japan (Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo). Before beginning his academic career, he was a corporate partner at the law firm of Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP in New York. He also served as an independent director at Eisai Co., Ltd., a listed Japanese pharmaceutical company. Professor Aronson twice received Fulbright grants to be a senior research scholar at the University of Tokyo and at Waseda University, and was a visiting scholar at the Bank of Japan. His main area of research is comparative corporate governance with a focus on Japan and Asia. Publications include a textbook, Corporate Governance in Asia: A Comparative Approach (with J. Kim, Cambridge University Press, 2019).