Description

Kentaro Matsubara has long worked on problems at the intersection of legal history and comparative law, and recently contributed to a debate concerning the relationship between these two disciplines with his article “East, East, and West: Comparative Law and the Historical Processes of Legal Interaction in China and Japan” (American Journal of Comparative Law, Feb 2019). In this talk, he will discuss some of his views on these disciplines, but will do so firstly tracing the historical processes of legal modernization in China and Japan, how the two processes interacted, and examine how this interaction contributed to certain views on traditional Chinese society. He will then go on to combine this insight with historical research into the workings of the traditional Chinese property regime, and suggest how one might reconstruct the social processes involving family, property and the state that underpinned such a regime. Finally, he will consider how to understand this comparative/historical project in a context relevant to present-day legal studies.

About The Speaker

Kentaro Matsubara is a Professor of Law at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics at The University of Tokyo. He has an LL.B. from the University of Tokyo and a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He specialises in oriental legal history and his research interest is in the historical study of the property regime and social structures in China. His recent publications include: “East, East, and West: Comparative Law and the Historical Processes of Legal Interaction in China and Japan” (American Journal of Comparative Law, 2019) and “Institutions of Credit and the Land Market in the New Territories of Hong Kong: Local Social Structuring and Colonization” in Sui-wai Cheung, ed. Colonial Administration and Land Reform in East Asia (Routledge, 2017). He is currently preparing a book manuscript on Law of the Ancestors: Lineage Property-Holding and Social Structures in 19th Century South China. He has held visiting appointments at Colombia Law School, The University of Hong Kong and Yale University.