2012 International Conference on Law and Society

Abstract

2012 International Conference on Law and Society was held in Honolulu from June 5th to 8th 2012. This was the fifth joint meeting of Law and Society Association and ISA Research Committee on Sociology of Law. Japanese Association of Sociology of Law, the Socio−Legal Studies Association of UK and Canadian Law and Society Association co-sponsored the joint meeting and attracted more than 2,300 participants from 64 countries. The conference consisted of one plenary session on “Socio-Legal Conversations across a Sea of Islands” and more than 500 sessions: eight featured sessions, individual sessions organized by International Research Collaboratives (IRC), Collaborative Research Networks (CRN) and Working Groups (WG) and independent sessions. Valerie Hans successfully obtained. National Science Foundation grant to invite scholars from low-income and middle-income countries. IRC Committee gave travel grant to more than 70 scholars for IRCs to organize more than 60 sessions. The scholars came from countries of Middle and South America, Asia, Africa as well as East Europe. The IRC scheme helped the Honolulu conference to become a truly international meeting. The author organized a featured session and four related sessions on law and disasters. An international group of researchers was organized after the East Japan Disaster in 2011. Activities of the group were funded by Japan Foundation Global Program, UC Berkeley Law School Sho Sato Program and Meiji University Disaster Project. We had the first meeting in Berkeley in October 2011, the second meeting in Tokyo in March 2012, and the sessions in Honolulu were our last opportunities to present papers. Topics we discussed were Recovery from “Natural Disasters,” How to Prevent or Mitigate Impacts of “Natural Disasters,” Safety Regulation of Nuclear Plants and Compensation for Nuclear Damages. The featured session on “Law and Disasters in Comparative Perspective: What Can We Learn from Experiences in Japan, the U.S., Chile, Indonesia and Thailand?” summarized issues discussed in the four sessions. The author joined a featured session on Changing Methodologies as a presenter. All the presenters used both qualitative and quantitative methods for their research. We discussed why we changed methods and what merits and demerits each method had. The author organized four sessions of CRN10 on Civil Justice and Disputing Behavior and chaired one of them on findings of the Taiwan survey in 2011. The survey was conducted with a view to comparing with findings of Civil Justice Research Project conducted in Japan.