Frank Upham’s scholarship focuses on Japan and China, and his
book Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan received the Thomas
J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press in 1987. Recent
scholarship includes “Who Will Find the Defendant If He Stays with His
Sheep? Justice in Rural China,” “From Demsetz to Deng: Speculations on
the Implications of Chinese Growth for Law and Development Theory,”
“Creating Law from the Ground Up: Land Law in Post-Conflict Cambodia,”
and “Resistible Force Meets Malleable Object: The Story of the
‘Introduction’ of Norms of Gender Equality into Japanese Employment
Practice.” Upham has spent time at various institutions in Asia and
works in Japanese and Chinese. Current research interests focus on the
role of property rights in economic growth from the English Enclosure
movement to contemporary Cambodia. Upham graduated from Princeton
University in 1967 and Harvard Law School in 1974 and worked as a
journalist in Asia and as an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts
before entering academia. In addition to having taught at NYU School of
Law since 1994, he has taught at Ohio State, Harvard, Boston College,
and UCLA law schools.