Professor Setsuo Miyazawa Joins Full Time Faculty at UC Hastings

Professor of Law Setsuo Miyazawa will join the UC Hastings faculty in the fall of 2013. Currently a professor at Aoyama Gakuin University Law School in Tokyo, Japan, Professor Miyazawa is an expert in the legal profession, the judicial system, criminology, and the sociology of law. He will teach at UC Hastings in the fall and at Aoyama Gakuin University in the spring.

“UC Hastings is honored to welcome Professor Miyazawa to the faculty,” says Chancellor & Dean Frank H. Wu. “We look forward to learning from him as we continue to reach out to the Pacific Rim."

“Professor Miyazawa is one of the world's leading scholars of Japanese law,” notes Professor Keith Hand, who is also an expert in East Asian legal systems, specifically Chinese Law. “His experience and insights will be invaluable as we develop our East Asian legal studies curriculum and position a growing number of students to take advantage of career opportunities in East Asia."

In fact, Professor Miyazawa is already a familiar face at UC Hastings. He has been teaching part of the fall semester for the past four years, offering a course entitled “Introduction to the Japanese Legal System.” In August 2012, Professor Miyazawa helped organize UC Hastings’ first-ever symposium to look at the successes and failures of efforts to reform the Japanese justice system. Japan has the fewest lawyers per capita of any developed country. As a result, Japanese citizens have difficulty accessing their justice system, which is largely self-regulated, tightly controlled, and lacks both transparency and a mechanism for checks and balances.

Professor Miyazawa has been writing and teaching about Japanese legal reforms at law schools around the globe. “I am committed to the reform of legal education and expanding the number and quality of judges,” he says. He also believes there need to be more attorneys in Japan. “No one else is shining a light on this.”

About joining the UC Hastings faculty, he says, “In spite of the increasing importance of East Asia for American lawyers, no law school in California has a stable program on East Asian law. Under the leadership of Chancellor & Dean Wu, UC Hastings has been quickly filling this vacuum. I admire UC Hastings and wish to be a bridge between East Asia and North America in the field of legal studies.” He is already planning a conference on corporate governance in Japan for October 2013.

Professor Miyazawa is a member of a number of academic associations in criminology, law, and sociology, and currently serves as the Vice President for the Asian Criminological Society. He has published 18 books, including Justice System Reform and Citizens' Perspectives (2001) and The Reality of the Legal Process (1994), as well as more than 200 articles appearing in such journals as Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Punishment and Society, Law & Social Inquiry, and the Law & Society Review. Professor Miyazawa has held permanent positions at Hokkaido University, Kobe University, Waseda University, and Omiya Law School. He has been at Aoyama Gakuin University since 2007. He has held visiting positions at more than ten US law schools, including Harvard, NYU, Berkeley, UCLA, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania.