Mark D. West, the Nippon Life Professor of Law and associate dean for academic affairs, is director of the Japanese Legal Studies Program. He is currently researching the ways in which common concepts from Japanese social psychology appear in Japanese case law. Prof. West is the author of Lovesick Japan: Sex • Marriage • Romance • Law (2011); Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States (2006); Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes (2005), and coauthor of The Japanese Legal System (2006) and Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan (2004). He has studied and taught at the University of Tokyo and Kyoto University, and has been a Fulbright Research Scholar, an Abe Fellow, and a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. From 2003 to 2008, he was director of the University of Michigan's Center for Japanese Studies. Prof. West earned his JD from Columbia University School of Law, where he was notes and comments editor of the Columbia Law Review. He clerked for the Hon. Eugene H. Nickerson of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and practiced in the law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in New York and Tokyo.

Video: Prof. West talks about sex, marriage, romance, and law in his book, Lovesick Japan.