Professor Margaret Lewis’s research focuses on law in China and Taiwan with an emphasis on criminal justice and human rights.

Professor Lewis has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at National Taiwan University, a visiting professor at Academia Sinica, a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a Public Intellectuals Program Fellow with the National Committee on United States-China Relations, and a delegate to the US-Japan Foundation’s US-Japan Leadership Program. Her publications have appeared in a number of academic journals including the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, NYU Journal of International Law and Politics, Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and Virginia Journal of International Law. She also co-authored the book Challenge to China: How Taiwan Abolished its Version of Re-Education Through Labor with Jerome A. Cohen.

Peking University Professor Fu Yulin will lead a roundtable discussion, in Chinese, on the implementation of announced judicial reforms to date, and what the future may hold for the Supreme Court’s reform program.

Heng Wang, Associate Professor of Law, University of New South Wales

China’s response to current US trade policy will have significant ramifications within China and may have spillover effects beyond China. This talk will assess how China is responding to the US trade approach, and what the wider implications may be, including for international governance.  In so doing, it will differentiate between China’s retaliatory, inclusive, and regulatory responses.

Professor James Li, Tsinghua University Law School

Empirical Study of China Supreme People’s Court’s Decisions on Non-enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1995-2015)

Immediately after the Second World War, Japan saw a rapid swell in the numbers of “New Religions.” One New Religion in particular came to dominate Japan’s religious landscape: Soka Gakkai, or the “Value Creation Study Association.”

Soka Gakkai grew far beyond conventional “religion” parameters and today it remains an influential presence in electoral politics, education, media, finance, and numerous other spheres. In this presentation, Professor McLaughlin provides an overview of Soka Gakkai’s growth in postwar Japan and brings its story up to the present by drawing on his ethnography as a non-member participant observer. He suggests that Soka Gakkai’s appeal to converts can be explained by ways it grew mimetic of the modern Japanese nation-state.

Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies (CEAS) and Center for Asian Law (CAL).

In this talk, Professor Schoppa unravels why Japanese have such high rates of local civic engagement by examining how parents and volunteers have mobilized to maintain high rates of walking to and from school during a period in which walk-to-school rates have plummeted in the United States.

Professor Schoppa argues that the higher rate of Japanese local engagement in this area is motivated by housing markets that limit residential mobility to much lower levels than in the United States. High cost of residential “exit” in Japan drives citizens to exercise “voice” to maintain the safety and walkability of their neighborhoods.

He Haibo is Professor of Law at Tsinghua University School of Law.  He is currently a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School’s Program on East Asian Legal Studies.  Professor Jacques deLisle will serve as commentator for this discussion.

In the twenty years since the Asian Financial Crisis, the countries of East Asia (ASEAN+3) have built the largest regional emergency liquidity fund in the world (CNIM). A total of US$240 billion has been pledged to aid member states facing a currency crisis, which far exceeds the funds they could access from the International Monetary Fund. Nonetheless, CMIM has been functionally subordinate to decisions made by the IMF, something that may now be changing. This talk addresses the long-term potential of CMIM as a bulwark for financial stability in East Asia.

Please join us for this timely talk with Wendy Cutler, Vice President and Managing Director of the Asia Society Policy Institute (ASPI) in Washington DC. Cutler will discuss policies the new Administration may pursue and what this means for our trading relationship with the Asia Pacific region.  As a former senior U.S. negotiator of the TPP agreement, she will share her thoughts on its fate, including how TPP countries and China are responding.

James Zhaojie Li, Professor of International Law, Tsinghua University Law School

The University of Pennsylvania Law School’s Center for Asian Law, as well as the Center for East Asian Studies and the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania invite you to join Professor Pasha Hsieh and the discussion on Law and Politics of Asia-Pacific Regionalism.
Lunch will be served.
Please RSVP below.

Wang Zhenmin

Professor and former Dean, Tsinghua University Law School

More than a year ago, the Fourth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party’s 18^th Central Committee signaled unprecedented emphasis on “the rule of law” and issued key policy documents to support legal and judicial reform in China.  One of China’s leading scholars of constitutional and public law will assess the reforms, how they have been pursued in different institutions in the Chinese legal system, and offer reflections on the challenges that remain ahead.

Lunch will be provided.

Mary Gallagher
Associate Professor of Political Science

University of Michigan

Kenneth R. Feinberg will deliver the Keynote Address for the conference “Earthquakes, Nuclear Meltdowns, and Chemical Spills: Legal Responses to Disasters in the US and Asia, ” on Thursday, November 19, 2015 at 4:30 pm at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. This Inaugural Conference, which will continue all day on November 20^th celebrates Penn Law’s new Center for Asian Law.

This event is open to the Penn community. Please RSVP below.