Japan

Georgia Law students Franklin Phan (J.D. ’27) and Kara Reed (J.D. ’26) receive UGA Asia-Georgia Internship Connection Scholarship

University of Georgia School of Law students Franklin Phan (J.D. ’27) and Kara Reed (J.D. ’26) were selected to receive funding for legal externships in Vietnam and Japan this summer through the UGA Office of Global Engagement’s Asia-Georgia Internship Connection Scholarship.

Both students’ scholarships will support their Global Externship Overseas (GEO), administered by Georgia Law’s Dean Rusk International Law Center. Phan will extern with KPMG Law in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, where will be supervised by Georgia Law alumnus Binh Tran (J.D. ’11), Director at KPMG Law. Reed’s GEO will take place in Tokyo, Japan, where she will extern with Kuribayashi Sogo Law Office under the guidance of Georgia Law alumnus Tsutomu Kuribayashi (LL.M. ’97), Managing Director. This will be Reed’s second GEO; the summer of her first year at Georgia Law, she externed with Baker Tilly in Hamburg, Germany, under the supervision of Georgia Law alumnus Dr. Christian Engelhardt (LL.M., ’01)

In addition to their externships, both students will engage in supervised research projects. Reed will work with Christopher M. Bruner, Stembler Family Distinguished Professor in Business Law & Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center. Her project will explore the relationships at contract formation in American and Japanese law. Pamela Foohey, Allen Post Professor of Law, will oversee Phan’s research regarding mechanisms for enforcing cross-border contracts.

This scholarship funds student pursuing credit-bearing internships in southeast Asia for a duration of at least four weeks. Preference is given to students traveling to Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam. Posts about past recipients of this scholarship at Georgia Law can be found here.

Reflections on Global Atlanta Event, “Georgia and Japan: 50 Years of Commerce and Culture — Debriefing on the 2023 SEUS-Japan Conference”

One of the Dean Rusk International Law Center’s current Visiting Research Scholars, Daesun Kim, Esq., attended this week’s Global Atlanta event, “Georgia and Japan: 50 Years of Commerce and Culture — Debriefing on the 2023 SEUS-Japan Conference.” Global Atlanta is one of the Center’s institutional partners. Below are some of Kim’s reflections of the event.

Global Atlanta, Baker Donelson, and the Japan-America Society of Georgia gathered on November 30 to discuss the October 2023 SEUS-Japan Conference. Around 50 economic and development leaders from Georgia participated in the October conference, which took place in Tokyo for the first time since COVID and included representatives from the 16 states in the Southeastern United States (SEUS). The visit by the Georgia delegation, in particular, holds significant meaning as it coincides with the 50th anniversary, commemorating the longstanding tradition and history between Japan and the state of Georgia.

The speakers at this week’s event, who reflected on their experience visiting Japan as part of this delegation, included:

  • Bob Johnson, immigration attorney at Baker Donelson, and board member of the Japan-America Society of Georgia
  • Trevor Williams, Managing Editor at Global Atlanta (moderator)
  • Jim Whitcomb, Chair of the Japan-America Society of Georgia
  • Jessica Cork, VP of Community Engagement and Communications at YKK, who was honored with the Busbee Award
  • Mellissa Takeuchi, Project Manager at the Georgia Department of Economic Development

The panelists’ takeaways from the SEUS-Japan Conference included the level of significance attributed to developing and maintaining personal connections with various government high-level officials. Georgia is a hub for Japanese businesses in the southeastern United States, with currently more than 500 Japanese-affiliated companies operating in the state, including YKK (USA) America, Inc., Kubota Manufacturing of America Corp., NACOM Corporation, and Yamaha Motor Mfg. Corp. of America. These officials see their establishment of personal and professional connections as significant contributors to the enhancement of economic and diplomatic cooperation.

These relationships are of particular importance for Georgia, whose Savannah Port acts as a gateway between Japan and the southeastern region of the U.S and thus plays a crucial role in the auto-EV-battery supply chain. It is anticipated that all states within SEUS will contribute to this industry’s growth; in particular, the panelists saw the development of certain business relationships, such as Toyota’s automotive and EV battery ventures, as important outcomes of the SEUS-Japan Conference.

Takeuchi highlighted the significance of the longstanding 50-year collaboration between SEUS and Japan. She noted a renewed energy from Japan to engage more actively and collaborate further with SEUS following the recent Japan visit. Additionally, she noted the importance of the Georgia-kai, a Georgia-based organization of Japanese expatriates, which holds a pivotal role in the state’s continued engagement with both existing and prospective Japanese industries.

The panelists agreed that Georgia and Japan’s growing relationship across economic, business, diplomatic, and cultural sectors is a direct result of this mutual investment in sustained communication and relationship building, the direct result of initiatives like the SEUS-Japan Conference.

Professor Amann’s draft “Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal” @ SSRN

Coomee Rustom Strooker-Dantra, 1937 (credit)

I’m very pleased to have posted a draft of my most recent paper, Glimpses of Women at the Tokyo Tribunal, online. The work arises out of my ongoing scholarly research into the roles that women and others played in the post-World War II international criminal trials. (prior posts) This research focuses primarily on trials at Nuremberg rather than at Tokyo; however, as this essay indicates, the issues and even the personnel in the two forums overlapped considerably.

Many women are brought to the fore in Glimpses; for example: 5 American lawyers, Virginia Bowman, Lucille Brunner, Eleanor Jackson, Helen Grigware Lambert, Grace Kanode Llewellyn, and Bettie Renner; 1 Dutch lawyer, Coomee Rustom Strooker-Dantra, who had been born in what is now Myanmar; and 1 American, memoir-writer Elaine B. Fischel, who assisted defense counsel but did not herself  become a lawyer until after her Tokyo service.

From left, Eleanor Jackson, Virginia Bowman, Grace Kanode Llewellyn, Bettie Renner, and Lucille Brunner, in Los Angeles Times, 15 April 1946 (credit)

Other women also figure – including some who have been introduced into the Tokyo narrative through a documentary, a feature film, and a miniseries, each analyzed in the essay.

Intended as a chapter in a forthcoming essay collection marking the 70th anniversary of the Tokyo Trial judgment, this draft manuscript forms part of the Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Paper Series at SSRN. It may be found in numerous SSRN sites, including the International, Transnational and Comparative Criminal Law eJournal, of which I am the Editor-in-Chief. I was honored to have presented it during last November’s American Society of International Law Midyear Meeting Research Forum at UCLA Law.

Here’s the abstract:

Compared to its Nuremberg counterpart, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East has scarcely been visible in the seven decades since both tribunals’ inception. Recently the situation has changed, as publications of IMTFE documents have occurred alongside divers legal and historical writings, as well as two films and a miniseries. These new accounts give new visibility to the Tokyo Trial – or at least to the roles that men played at those trials. This essay identifies several of the women at Tokyo and explores roles they played there, with emphasis on lawyers and analysts for the prosecution and the defense. As was the case with my 2010 essay, “Portraits of Women at Nuremberg,” the discussion is preliminary, offering glimpses of the Tokyo women in an effort to encourage further research.

The full manuscript may be downloaded here.

Elaine B. Fischel with Tokyo defense counsel, 12 September 1946 (credit)

(cross-posted from Diane Marie Amann blog)

Professor Wells publishes review of book on torts harmonization in Europe

Professor Michael Lewis Wells, who holds the Marion and W. Colquitt Carter Chair in Tort and Insurance Law here at the University of Georgia School of Law, has posted “Harmonizing European Tort Law and the Comparative Method: Basic Questions of Tort Law from a Comparative Perspective” at SSRN. The review of a book by a Viennese torts scholar is forthcoming in volume 9 of the peer-reviewed Journal of Civil Law Studies.

The manuscript, which forms part of our Dean Rusk International Law Center Research Paper Series at SSRN, may be downloaded here.

Here’s the abstract:

This is a book review of Basic Questions of Tort Law from a Comparative Perspective, edited by Professor Helmut Koziol. This book is the second of two volumes on “basic questions of tort law.” In the first volume, Professor Helmut Koziol examined German, Austrian, and Swiss tort law. In this volume Professor Koziol has assembled essays by distinguished scholars from several European legal systems as well as the United States and Japan, each of whom follows the structure of Koziol’s earlier book and explains how those basic questions are handled in their own systems.

This review focuses on Professor Koziol’s ultimate aim of harmonization, and on the contribution of these essays to that project. Harmonization of tort law across the member states is not just a matter of working out answers to such questions as the content of the liability rule or whether non-pecuniary harm should be recoverable. Harmonization raises an issue of European Union federalism. That question is not explicitly addressed in either volume, yet the value of the project, and prospects for its success, turn on the answer to it. I argue that Professor Koziol has not made a convincing case for EU displacement of member state tort law.