West, Mark D.

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West, Mark D.

PERSONAL:

Education: Rhodes College, B.A., 1989; Columbia University, J.D., 1993.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1080 S. University Ave., Ste. 3640, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106. E-mail—markwest@umich.edu.

CAREER:

Writer, attorney, and educator. United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, clerk for judge Eugene H. Nickerson; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, Tokyo, Japan, New York, NY, attorney; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, professor of law, Center for Japanese Studies, director, 2003—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Abe fellow, 1996-97; Japan Society for the Promotion of Science fellow; Fulbright research scholar.

WRITINGS:

(With Curtis J. Milhaupt) Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2004.

Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2005.

The Japanese Legal System: Cases, Codes, and Commentary, Thomson/West (St. Paul, MN), 2006.

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Mark D. West received his B.A. from Rhodes College in 1989 before attending Columbia University, where he received his J.D. in 1993. West served as a clerk for Judge Eugene H. Nickerson in the United States District Court, Eastern District of New York, and then practiced law for Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in both New York, NY, and in Tokyo, Japan. West's most recent positions include professor of law at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, and director for the university's Center for Japanese Studies. West's research interests include East Asian studies, specifically human sexual relationships, and organized crime-based studies in Japanese case law. West has released several publications utilizing this subject matter, including Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules; Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes; The Japanese Legal System: Cases, Codes, and Commentary; and Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States.

Released in 2004, Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan, which West wrote with Curtis J. Milhaupt, is an analysis that explores the relationship between Japanese institutions and their role in the country's infrastructure. The text focuses on "seven case studies by two leading American scholars of Japanese law. The topics include shareholder derivative suits, venture capital, the "jūsen problem," sokaiya, organized crime, and an analysis of elite law career preferences as lawyers or as bureaucrats," explained John O. Haley in an essay for the Journal of Japanese Studies. Haley also noted, "Each chapter individually, and the book as a whole, offer informative and insightful perspectives on Japanese economic organizations and governance. The authors unquestionably achieve their principal aim in describing tensions, pressures for change, and failures of formal and informal institutional arrangements." The text explores several elements in Japanese governance that, in concert, allowed organized crime to become successful, including issues of property rights and ineffective law enforcement. Moreover, Haley's mention of the "jūsen" issue refers to the banking industry's poor judgment regarding loan making, due to regulatory measures that were put in place by competing interests, and the resulting economic inflation that ensued in the last three decades. Although Haley remarked that the authors "write with a distinctly American perspective and a peculiarly American agenda of interest," he acknowledged that "the chapter on venture capital is exemplary" and "the authors do make provocative claims on the effect of legal reforms and institutional change in the book's final chapters."

West's Law in Everyday Japan, published in 2005 by the University of Chicago Press, also uses legal case studies to frame an argument regarding the manner in which law profoundly affects Japanese society. Nina C. Ayoub called West's approach "a blend of fieldwork, rational-choice theory, and statistical analysis" in a review for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Ayoub further noted that West, in an effort "to document both law's triviality and its importance," follows "the interplay of law, norms, and behavior through quirky case studies." West includes legal situations as wide ranging as the enterprise surrounding sumo wrestling, the commonality of suicides motivated by an individual's debt, and property litigation prior to and following the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Gary D. Allinson stated, in his article for the Historian, that West combines "two major approaches in contemporary legal scholarship: 1) law and economics, with its emphasis on rational choice; and 2) the law-and-society approach. It is probably most accurate to describe this work as an ethnography of the law in Japan, given its balanced attention to law and customs and to behavior and its legal causes." West's breadth of examples all support his initial claim that the legal system affects society at every level in Japan, and, as a result, changes in this institution have societal repercussions. In a contribution to the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Sonia Ryang pointed out that West's "conclusion asserts that, although in Japan lawsuits may not be heard of as often or occur in actuality as frequently as in the US, law-abidingness and social norms inform, directly or indirectly, but nevertheless strongly and effectively, the way people conduct their everyday life."

Building upon the expansive ideas detailed in these previous works, West's Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, released in 2006, takes a more focused approach to Japanese legal studies by "unraveling the interplay of social and legal rules that influence the formation of scandal and spectacle in Japan and the United States," according to Benjamin L. Liebman's essay for the Michigan Law Review. By choosing the specific behavioral topics of scandal and spectacle, West narrows his examination of the manner in which law and society intersect. As Liebman acknowledged, West once more illustrates the importance of law and how "institutions and rules, both formal and informal, matter in determining the types of occurrences that become scandal in a given society; and scandal is not simply the product of culture."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Comparative Law, September 22, 2006, John O. Haley, review of Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes, p. 891.

Chronicle of Higher Education, September 23, 2005, Nina C. Ayoub, review of Law in Everyday Japan.

Far Eastern Economic Review, November 1, 2005, Emily Parker, review of Law in Everyday Japan, p. 76.

Harvard Law Review, December 1, 2005, review of Law in Everyday Japan, p. 702.

Historian, March 22, 2007, Gary D. Allinson, review of Law in Everyday Japan, p. 140.

Journal of Economic Literature, June 1, 2005, review of Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules, p. 562.

Journal of Japanese Studies, winter, 2006, John O. Haley, review of Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan, p. 235.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, December 1, 2006, Sonia Ryang, review of Law in Everyday Japan, p. 976.

Law and Social Inquiry, March 22, 2005, review of Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan, p. 463.

Law & Society Review, December 1, 2007, Ari Adut, review of Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States, p. 992.

Michigan Law Review, April 1, 2008, Benjamin L. Liebman, review of Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, p. 1041.