
Visiting Professor Setsuo Miyazawa is a legal sociologist who 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 (1972-1983), Kobe University (1983-2000), Waseda University (2000-2003), and Omiya Law School (2004-2007) in Japan. He is currently a professor of law at Aoyama Gakuin University Law School in central Tokyo, where he teaches the sociology of law, legal profession, public interest lawyering, and legal research, and coordinates courses on American law. He has 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. His first visit to Hastings was in 2008, and 2012 is his fourth visit.
Professor Miyazawa has a wide range of research interests, including police and criminal justice, legal ethics and public interest lawyering, legal education, and corporate legal practice; he received his doctoral degree in Japan with a study on police, while receiving his American doctoral degree with a study on corporate legal departments. He has published or edited more than a dozen books in Japanese and English. His first English book, Policing in Japan (SUNY Press 1992), received the 1993 Distinguished Book Award of the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology. One of his most recent books in Japanese is the first casebook on legal ethics in Japan that is coedited with two lawyers. He has been highly active in the promotion of judicial reform in Japan and is one of the most prominent proponents of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law schools into Japan. He has also been active in the Law and Society Association, twice serving on its Board of Trustees.