Biography
Mark D. West, the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and the Nippon Life Professor of Law, is the director of the Japanese Legal Studies Program at the Law School. His current research focuses on love, sex, and marriage in Japanese case law, and on comparative fraud and con artistry. Professor West is the author of Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes (2005), Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States (2006), and editor of The Japanese Legal System: Cases, Codes, and Commentary (2006). 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 2003-08, he was director of the University of Michigan Center for Japanese Studies. Professor West earned his B.A., magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Rhodes College, and his J.D. with multiple honors from Columbia University School of Law, where he was notes and comments editor for 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.

See also the Law School's Japanese law information page.