An alert reader notes that I misinterpreted what John Haley said at dinner (now corrected below). He said that when he started, there was only one specialist in Japanese law in America, and I interpreted that to mean himself, but he meant the man who hired him, Dan Henderson, who started at the University of Washington in 1962 and whose obituary is here.
05.01a Tom Ginsburg's Japanese Law Conference in Champaign. The University of Illinois School of Law conference on Japanese Law was a great success. John Haley and I kicked it off by debating the degree of independence of the Japanese judiciary. I hadn't met him before, and just knew that he was very eminent in Japanese Studies--the kind of person whose articles you've read since undergraduate days, if you know what I mean-- and has been strongly criticizing my 2003 book with Mark Ramseyer, Measuring Judicial Independence in various book reviews and suchlike places. But we got along very well, despite clear disagreement on certain points, and our various dimensions of agreement and disagreement added drama which I think helped keep the audience alert. We each talked for twenty minutes, and then Judge Okazaki, who is visiting Champaign, gave some comments from someone inside the judiciary. At mealtimes and walking around campus, we had some very interesting discussions of reconciliation and confession in criminal law in Japan and the U.S, prosecutor incentives, and so forth.

This initial hour was discussion of past work mostly, but the rest of the papers were work in progress, and, amazingly for a conference, every single one of them was interesting. My old neighbor from Shirokanedai's U. of Tokyo housing, Robert Leflar, was there from Arkansas talking about medical malpractice and cover-up; there were papers on how to run a patent system and on why there is resale price maintenance for Manga comic books; a third intellectual property expert talked about the 1946 writing of Article 9, which forbids Japan from having an army; Tom Ginsburg used Poisson regressions to try to explain why litigation increased in Japan in the 1990's; George Ehrhardt told wonderful stories about Koizumi, Suzuki, and Tanaka the Younger and related the problem of controlling bureaucrats to our starting debate about controlling judges... Maybe I'll even blog on them here another day.

At the end, John Haley got up and said that the conference was at least as good as any he'd ever attended. He said that when he started there was only one specialist in Japanese law in America, and now in that room were a half-dozen, and that the Midwest was probably stronger in the field than the East and West Coasts combined. (He was at U. of Washington in Seattle for a long time, but is now, confusingly, at Washington U. in St. Louis.) That's especially notable since the presentations were in highly diverse styles, as you can tell from my description above-- economistical, poli sci storytelling, legal textual analysis, regressions, organization theory... I had a good time and learned a lot. [in full at 04.05.01a.htm]

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