UW Law is honored to welcome back Professor Mark Levin (Asian & Compartive Law LL.M., 1990) for a special Global Mondays Lecture:

"Situating Gender and Law in Japanese Legal Education:
Preliminary exploration and Comments"

Mark Levin
Director, Pacific-Asian Legal Studies Program and Professor of Law University of Hawai’i at Mānoa

Professor Mark A. Levin, a Japanese law specialist at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa William S. Richardson Law School since 1997, is the director of the school’s Pacific-Asian Legal Studies program. Levin is also deputy director of the Institute of Asian-Pacific Business Law at the UH law school. A graduate of the UW Law Asian Law LL.M. Program (’90), Prof. Levin is a renowned scholar on diverse topics on law in Japan, including law and gender in Japan, judicial administration and procedural justice in Japan, smoking and tobacco regulation in Japan, legal education in Japan, and the legal circumstances of race and indigenous peoples in Japan.

There has been a relative lack of attention in English writing, and even to a certain degree in Japanese language scholarship, to the status of women in Japanese legal institutions, be it in the legal profession or in legal education. But if the status of women in Japanese law or even, women in Japan more generally, is to be meaningfully considered, circumstances demand qualitative and quantitative attention to inequities in the human institutions from which law derives. In his presentation, Prof. Levin will offer a comparative history and status quo of women in legal education in the U.S. and in Japan and suggest that that well-functioning programs for personnel (students, faculty, and administration), pedagogy, community, and scholarship by and for women in legal education can make things better for "women in law" and "women and the law"