I’m James, an academic lawyer from South Wales, living in Tokyo since 2013. I’m currently an Associate Professor at Sophia University.
This site is a guide to my work, and provides information on my research, teaching, and other stuff I do.
more about me
I came to Japan in 2013 supported by a Daiwa Scholarship (which gives ‘young and talented UK citizens with strong leadership potential the opportunity to acquire Japanese language skills, and to access expertise and knowledge relevant to their career goals’). Before this I read Law at the University of Oxford (St Catherine’s College), with an additional year studying European and international law at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
After a year of intensive Japanese language training and a stint at the Tokyo offices of an international law firm, I started my academic career at the University of Tokyo’s Faculty of Law & Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, where I spent five fulfilling years as a Project Associate Professor before taking up my current position at Sophia University. I am also finalising a (belated…) PhD dissertation in comparative trusts law, externally affiliated to Utrecht University.
My interests lie at the intersection of doctrinal private law, comparative law theory, jurisprudence and critical socio-legal studies. I publish primarily on the English and Japanese laws of obligations and property (especially contract and trusts), and secondarily on public law and socio-legal topics (principally in Japan).
I am an elected Fellow of the European Law Institute and the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of the major legal scholarly associations in the UK (the Society of Legal Scholars, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the Society for Advanced Legal Studies) and specialist networks for the study of law in Japan and wider East Asia (the German-Japanese Association of Jurists, the Australian Network for Japanese Law and the Asian Law and Society Association).
Outside work, most of my time is spent on socialist activism and Japanese martial arts. I organise the monthly Tokyo Radical Book Club, but most evenings I can be found training in Aikido, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, or Aunkai Bujutsu. I’m low-key obsessed with posture, movement, and generally how bodies work best, and indulge my urge to pontificate about spinal alignment as a Registered Yoga Teacher.
I also enjoy playing the koto (with more enthusiasm than talent), baking, and buying books I will never read. I’m also learning to snowboard, and haven’t died yet.