John Mark Ramseyer
John Mark Ramseyer (born c. 1954) is Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and a leading scholar on the subjects of Japanese Law and Law and Economics.
On November 3, 2018, Ramseyer was awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, from the Japanese government in recognition of "his extensive contributions to the development of Japanese studies in the U.S. and the promotion of understanding toward Japanese society and culture."[1][2]
Education[edit]
- B.A., Goshen College 1976, History
- A.M., University of Michigan 1978, Japanese Studies
- J.D., Harvard Law School 1982
Ramseyer lived in Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan through the age of 18 and is fluent in the Japanese language. He has taught at several Japanese universities including the University of Tokyo and Hitotsubashi University.
College and university positions[edit]
- Adjunct Instructor of Law: Hitotsubashi University and Tohoku University in Japan.[3]
- Visiting Professor of Law: Harvard Law School, 1991.
- University of Chicago Law School
- Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies: Harvard Law School, 1998–present.
Selected publications[edit]
source[4]
- Ramseyer, J. Mark (March 2021). "Contracting for sex in the Pacific War". International Review of Law and Economics. 65. doi:10.1016/j.irle.2020.105971.
- J. Mark Ramseyer, Second-Best Justice: The Virtues of Japanese Private Law (2015)
- Yoshiro Miwa & J. Mark Ramseyer, The Fable of the Keiretsu: Urban Legends of the Japanese Economy (Univ. of Chi. Press 2006)
- J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, Measuring Judicial Independence: The Political Economy of Judging in Japan (Univ. of Chi. Press 2003)
- Japanese Law: Readings in the Political Economy of Japanese Law (J. Mark Ramseyer ed., forthcoming, Routledge Revivals 2021)
- J. Mark Ramseyer, Book Review, Japanese Stud. (Oct. 23, 2020) (reviewing R.W. Kostal, Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (2019))
- J. Mark Ramseyer, Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan (John M. Olin Ctr. for L. Econ. & Bus. Discussion Paper No. 1043, Oct. 2, 2020)
- J. Mark Ramseyer, Contracting for Compassion in Japanese Buddhism (Harv. John M. Olin Ctr. Discussion Paper No. 1039, Sept. 10, 2020)
- J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, Suing over Ostracism in Japan: The Informational Logic (Aug. 29, 2020)
J. Mark Ramseyer, Book Review, Japanese Stud. (Oct. 23, 2020) (reviewing R.W. Kostal, Laying Down the Law: The American Legal Revolutions in Occupied Germany and Japan (2019)).
J. Mark Ramseyer, Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan (John M. Olin Ctr. for L. Econ. & Bus. Discussion Paper No. 1043, Oct. 2, 2020).
J. Mark Ramseyer, Contracting for Compassion in Japanese Buddhism (Harv. John M. Olin Ctr. Discussion Paper No. 1039, Sept. 10, 2020).
J. Mark Ramseyer & Eric B. Rasmusen, Suing over Ostracism in Japan: The Informational Logic (Aug. 29, 2020).
J. Mark Ramseyer, A Monitoring Theory of the Underclass: With Examples from Outcastes, Koreans, and Okinawans in Japan (Jan. 24, 2020).
References[edit]
External links[edit]
- Harvard Law School: J. Mark Ramseyer
=======================
Contracting for Compassion in Japanese Buddhism
Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center Discussion Paper No. 1039, 2020
30 Pages Posted: 30 Oct 2020
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard Law School
Date Written: September 10, 2020
Abstract
In the 1960s, Japanese women began asking temples to perform commemorative ceremonies for the fetuses or children they had aborted. They still do. Physicians have been able to perform abortions legally since 1952, and many women have had them. The ceremonies do not fit within the classic rituals offered by the temples, but many Japanese women find them helpful. They ask for the services. The temples respond.
The temples charge for these memorial services. They rely on such fee-for-service arrangements for an increasingly important segment of their finances. Traditionally, priests had stood ready to offer their parishioners counseling and ritual as needed during the existentially troubling passages in their lives. In exchange, their local communities had effectively kept the temple on retainer. This no longer works. The temples stand in low levels of tension with the surrounding society (as Stark put it). As such, they cannot trust their parishioners to give voluntarily. Instead, they had counted on the constraining power of the tightly intertwined social network within the local community.
Over the course of the 20th century, Japanese migrated out of these tightly structured villages to the often anomic cities. Without a coercive village structure to enforce giving, the low-tension temples found themselves without their effective retainer. With the first-best contract unavailable, many temples have turned to fee-for-service arrangements — of which the abortion-related ritual is merely the most notorious. Ironically, the new environment presents an entirely different challenge: temples now find themselves competing with internet-based priest-dispatch services.
Keywords: Abortion, Fee-for-Service, Buddhism, Japan
=============
Social Capital and the Problem of Opportunistic Leadership: The Example of Koreans in Japan
Harvard Law School John M. Olin Center Discussion Paper No. 1043, 2020
31 Pages Posted: 20 Nov 2020
J. Mark Ramseyer
Harvard Law School
Date Written: October 2, 2020
Abstract
Through webs of cross-cutting ties, groups can build "social capital" -- the ability to use the resulting access to information and collective punishment to enforce on each other their norms of appropriate behavior. Yet not all minorities maintain such networks. And groups without them sometimes find themselves manipulated by opportunistic entrepreneurs who capture private benefits for themselves while generating massive hostility and (statistical) discrimination against the group as a whole. As one adage puts it, sometimes the worst enemy of a minority group is its own leadership.
Consider the Korean residents of Japan. Koreans had begun to migrate to Japan in the 1910s. They were poor, single, male, young, uneducated, and did not intend to stay long. As one might expect given those characteristics, they maintained only very low levels of social capital, and generated substantial (statistical) discrimination against themselves.
After the Second World War, most Koreans returned to their homeland. Among those who stayed, however, a self-appointed core of fringe-left opportunists took control and manipulated the group toward their private political ends. Lacking the dense networks that would let them constrain the opportunists, the resident Koreans could not stop them.
- Those with the most talent, sophistication, and education simply left the group and migrated into Japanese society.
- The opportunistic leaders exploited the vulnerable Koreans who remained, captured private benefits for themselves, and generated enormous hostility and (statistical) discrimination against the rest.
Keywords: discrimination; collective action; social capital; economic history
---
Japan's Political Marketplace
by J. Mark Ramseyer (Author), Frances M. Rosenbluth (Author)
4.7 out of 5 stars 3 ratings
Mark Ramseyer and Frances McCall Rosenbluth show how rational-choice theory can be applied to Japanese politics. Using the concept of principal and agent,Ramseyer/and Rosenbluth construct a persuasive account of political relationships in Japan. In doing so, they demonstrate that political considerations and institutional arrangements reign in what, to most of the world, looks like an independently powerful bureaucratic state.
------------------
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Ramseyer and Rosenbluth present a view of Japanese politics that coherently links voters, politicians, bureaucrats, and judges into patterns of interaction governed by the logic of the 'political marketplace.' They succeed in demonstrating that many of the analytical tools developed to study the politics of advanced Western democracies are not only applicable in the Japanese context, but also are capable of yielding novel interpretations of politics in Japan.”―Amy Searight, Pacific Affairs
“[A] Well researched and carefully thought out study of Japanese politics.”―Hugh Cortazzi, Asian Affairs
“Fodder for scholarly research for years to come.”―Steven R. Reed, American Journal of Sociology
About the Author
J. Mark Ramseyer is Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, Harvard University Law School.
Frances McCall Rosenbluth is Professor of Political Science at Yale University.
Product details
ASIN : 0674472810
Publisher : Harvard University Press (March 25, 1997)
Language : English
Paperback : 272 pages
-------------
Customer reviews
4.7 out of 5 stars
Top reviews
Top review from the United States
Elle
4.0 out of 5 stars Good introduction to Japanese politics
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2009
Verified Purchase
This was one of my textbooks for a class in Japanese politics, and while some of the tables and charts might seem superfluous or overwhelming to someone with little background on the subject (like myself), the book's first two chapters make up a particularly good summary of Japan's political structure, discussing briefly how culture plays into it, and how voters and the electoral systems are organized.
Each of the ten chapters also has a conclusion that clarifies the content of the chapter, which I found an effective tool for understanding the denser material -- the many factions of the Liberal Democratic Party (Japan's main ruling party), and how its conservative leaders have been able to maintain power relatively uninterrupted in Japan.
One person found this helpful
-------------
Mark Ramseyer, UTokyo lecture
"On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan "
June 13, 2019
Gregory Noble's pictureDiscussion published by Gregory Noble on Tuesday, June 4, 2019 0 Replies
Your network editor has reposted this from H-Announce. The byline reflects the original authorship.
Type: Lecture
Date: June 13, 2019
Location: Japan
Subject Fields: Anthropology, Law and Legal History, Japanese History / Studies
The Contemporary Japan Group at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Social Science
(ISS, or Shaken), welcomes you to a lecture by
On the Invention of Identity Politics: The Buraku Outcastes in Japan
TIME AND PLACE
June 13, 2019 from 6:00-7:30 p.m. at Akamon Sōgō Kenkyūtō Room 549, Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, Hongo Campus, University of Tokyo
-----------------------
ABSTRACT
Using 14 national censuses and a wide variety of first-hand accounts, I trace the transformation of Japan's putative outcastes and their nominal human rights organization into a heavily criminal extortion machine. Scholars have long described the outcastes -- the "burakumin" -- as descended from a pre-modern leather-workers' guild. Their members suffer discrimination because their ancestors handled carcasses, and ran afoul of a traditional Japanese obsession with ritual purity.
In fact, most burakumin are descended not from leather-workers, but from poor farmers with distinctively dysfunctional norms. Others may or may not have shunned them out of concern for purity, but they certainly would have shunned many of them for their involvement in crime and their disintegrating family structures.
The modern transformation of the buraku began in 1922, when self-described Bolsheviks launched a buraku "liberation" organization. To fit the group within Marxist historical schema, they invented for it the fictive identity as a leather-workers' guild that continues to this day. Bitter identity politics followed. Within a few years, criminal entrepreneurs hijacked the new organization, and pioneered a shakedown strategy that coupled violent accusations of bias with demands for massive amounts of money. Selective out-migration and spiraling levels of public subsidies ensued. The logic follows straightforwardly from the economic logic outlined by Becker and Hirschman: given ever-larger amounts of (expropriable) subsidies, burakumin with the lowest opportunity costs faced ever-larger incentives to stay in the buraku and invest in criminal careers; given the virulent public hostility that this strategy generated, those burakumin with the highest legitimate career options abandoned the community and merged into the general public instead.
------------------
SPEAKER
J. Mark Ramseyer is the Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He spent most of his childhood in provincial towns and cities in southern Japan, attending Japanese schools for K-6. He returned to the U.S. for college. Before attending law school, he studied Japanese history in graduate school. Ramseyer graduated from Harvard Law School in 1982. He clerked for the Hon. Stephen Breyer (then on the First Circuit), worked for two years at Sidley & Austin (in corporate tax), and studied as a Fulbright student at the University of Tokyo. After teaching at UCLA and the University of Chicago, he moved to Harvard in 1998. He has also taught or co-taught courses at several Japanese universities (in Japanese). In his research, Ramseyer primarily studies Japanese law, and primarily from a law & economics perspective.
===
Home
Academic
Politics and international relations
Comparative politics
0
LOOK INSIDE
Odd Markets in Japanese History
Law and Economic Growth
Part of Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions
AUTHOR: J. Mark Ramseyer, University of Chicago
DATE PUBLISHED: January 2008
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Paperback
ISBN: 9780521048255
Rate & review
DescriptionContentsResourcesCoursesAbout the Authors
Employing a rational-choice approach, Professor Ramseyer studies the impact of Japanese law on economic growth in Japan. Toward that end, the author investigates the way law governed various markets and the way that people negotiated contracts within those markets. For much of the period at stake, the Japanese government was an oligarchy rather than a democracy; the judges operated a civil rather than common law regime; the economy grew modestly but erratically; and social customs changed rapidly and radically. As a result, this study applies an economic logic, but to markets in a vastly different world, in a different historical period, and with a different political regime and legal system. Findings reveal that the legal system generally promoted mutually advantageous deals, and that people generally negotiated in ways that shrewdly promoted their private best interests. Whether in the markets for indentured servants, prostitutes, or marriage partners, Odd Markets in Japanese History reports little evidence of either age- or gender- related exploitation.
===
Home
Academic
Politics and international relations
Comparative politics
0
LOOK INSIDE
Odd Markets in Japanese History
Law and Economic Growth
Part of Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions
AUTHOR: J. Mark Ramseyer, University of Chicago
DATE PUBLISHED: January 2008
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Paperback
ISBN: 9780521048255
Rate & review
DescriptionContentsResourcesCoursesAbout the Authors
Employing a rational-choice approach, Professor Ramseyer studies the impact of Japanese law on economic growth in Japan. Toward that end, the author investigates the way law governed various markets and the way that people negotiated contracts within those markets. For much of the period at stake, the Japanese government was an oligarchy rather than a democracy; the judges operated a civil rather than common law regime; the economy grew modestly but erratically; and social customs changed rapidly and radically. As a result, this study applies an economic logic, but to markets in a vastly different world, in a different historical period, and with a different political regime and legal system. Findings reveal that the legal system generally promoted mutually advantageous deals, and that people generally negotiated in ways that shrewdly promoted their private best interests. Whether in the markets for indentured servants, prostitutes, or marriage partners, Odd Markets in Japanese History reports little evidence of either age- or gender- related exploitation.
Ties legal change in Japan to economic growth
Uses economic (rational actor) model to understand Japanese law
Challenges general exploitation and feminist accounts of pre-war Japan
-------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment