CEALS Releases 23-24 Annual Report

In our second full year as the a Center for East Asian Legal Studies, we celebrated a bittersweet milestone, as Senior Director Setsuo Miyazawa, one of the world’s leading legal sociologists, stepped down from active teaching duties. He has offered Japanese law at UC Law SF since 2009. For five decades, Professor Miyazawa has been an intellectual leader in the Asian law field, publishing or editing more than a dozen books and countless articles on policing and criminal justice, legal ethics, public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate law in Japan. He led numerous prominent scholarly associations focused on Asian law and received the Law & Society Association’s Stanton Wheeler Mentorship Award and Legacy Award in 2021. As Professor Miyazawa steps into his new role as CEALS Emeritus Senior Director, I thank him for his mentorship and countless contributions to the field and our law school. I’m also pleased to announce that CEALS has established the Setsuo Miyazawa Fund for Japanese Legal Studies, so community members who wish to honor Professor Miyazawa’s legacy can support our continued work in the Japanese law field.

CEALS expanded its programming and impact in the 23-24 academic year. We hosted eleven public events with senior scholars and practitioners from Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Korea, Vietnam, and the United States. More than 550 in-person and virtual participants benefitted from expert insights at our events, which focused on topics ranging from tensions in the South China Sea to U.S. trade policy in East Asia and cybercurrency regulation in Japan. Participants at our Japanese law symposium published a series of academic papers on Japan’s open government information movement. We welcomed two new Affiliated Scholars with deep expertise on China and Japan, and thirteen students produced scholarly papers in our Japanese law course. Our scholars and affiliates presented their research at conferences across the United States and Asia. We hope you enjoy learning more about these contributions in our 23-24 Annual Report, and we thank you for your continued support!