UC Hastings College of the Law was founded in 1878 as the first law department of the University of California, and today is one of the top-rated law schools in the United States. Our alumni span the globe and are among the most respected lawyers, judges and business leaders today. Our faculty are nationally renowned as both teachers and scholars.

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Awarded by the Law and Society Association.

International Prize

Awarded by the Division of International Criminology of the American Society of Criminology for the book "Policing in Japan".

Distinguished Book Award 

Kobe University  Professor Emeritus

Temple University Japan Adjunct Professor of Asian Studies,

Aoyama Gakuin University and Waseda University  Visiting Lecturer of Law

University of California at Berkeley  Distinguished Affiliate Scholar of the Center for the Study of Law and Society

Ryukoku University  Affiliate Research of the Corrections and Rehabilitation Research Center

The Enigma of Japan as a Testing Ground for Cross-Cultural Criminological Studies

Introduction to the Special Issue: The Future of Lay Adjudication and Theorizing Today's Resurgence of Civic, Legal Participatory Systems in East and Central Asia

Legal Culture and the State in Modern Japan: Continuity and Change

The Resurgence of Lay Adjudicatory Systems in East Asia

The Reform of Legal Education in East Asia

Policing in Japan: A Study on Making Crime (Suny Series in Critical Issues in Criminal Justice)

East Asia’s Renewed Respect for the Rule of Law in the 21st Century: The Future of Legal and Judicial Landscapes in East Asia (Brill's Asian Law)

The Japanese legal system is at a crossroads. The contributors to this book explore the most important features of the adversary process as it works in the Japanese criminal justice system. Topics include the right to remain silent, wire tapping, the role of defense counsel, plea bargaining, the power of prosecutors, juvenile justice and judicial independence. Many of the essays seek comparison with practices in Anglo-American countries.

The Japanese Adversary System in Context: Controversies and Comparisons

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. He has been a full-time faculty member at Hokkaido University, Kobe University, Waseda University, Omiya Law School, and Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan before reaching mandatory retirement at Aoyama Gakuin in 2016. He has also taught as a visiting professor at the law schools of York University (Canada), the University of Washington, Harvard, UC Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, the University of Hawaii, the University of Pennsylvania, and Fordham. His first visit to Hastings was in 2008, and he joined full time faculty at Hastings in the fall 2013. He teaches at Hastings in the fall and serves as the Senior Director of the East Asian Legal Studies Program established in 2015. He has also organized an annual symposium on Japanese law at Hastings since 2012.

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. He has been highly active in the promotion of judicial reform in Japan, where he was one of the most prominent proponents of the introduction of the American-style graduate professional law schools. He has also been active in the Law and Society Association (LSA) in the US, twice serving on its Board of Trustees. He co-founded the Collaborative Research Network 33 in East Asian Law and Society in the LSA in 2008 and received the International Scholarship Prize from the LSA in 2014. He continues his activities as an institution builder and co-founded the Section on East Asian Law and Society in the AALS in 2015 and the Asian Law and Society Association (ALSA) in 2016. He was the founding President of the ALSA in 2016 and 2017. The Legal Process in Contemporary Japan: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Setsuo Miyazawa’s 70th Birthday was published in 2017 in two volumes with more than 70 articles in both Japanese and English.

Public Interest Lawyering

Legal Education

Corporate Legal Practice

Policing in Japan

Sociology of Law

Police and Criminal Justice

Legal Ethics 

Japanese

Publications

Law Review Articles on SSRN

Setsuo Miyazawa Wins Law and Society Association International Prize

Senior Professor of Law and Senior Director of the East Asian Legal Studies Program

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