Since the establishment in 1877, the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law has been proud of our global perspectives in teaching and researching with a variety of professorships of Common Law, French Law, German Law, International Law, and so on. In our modern world of borderless human and information movement and economic activities, legal studies need collaboration of traditional subjects of law. This viewpoint facilitates expansion of covered topics in each subject of law, such as foreign and comparative law, international law, private international law, and even basic subjects of Japanese law, on the one hand, and also it demands new platform for integrating those perspective on the other.

In April 2020, the University of Tokyo Graduate Schools for Law and Politics established such a new platform, Suenobu Foundation Professorship of Transnational Law, for integrating and making public to the world our rich research activities. Suenobu Foundation is a scholarship foundation for common law and comparative law studies, established in 1933 by late Professor Sanji Suenobu, professor of common law of the University of Tokyo, and makes a generous contribution for our initiative.

The educational activities of this professorship include a new course, “Transnational Law”, by project faculty, and supports for teaching of transnational perspectives in other courses and seminars. Those activities contribute to our faculty’s initiative for expansion of teaching in English. Research activities include holding academic seminars and conference and disseminating them in English. We will present Japanese and East Asian perspectives of transnational law and have a collaboration with transnational law institutions in the world.