Professor Frank Upham

Co-Director

Prof. Frank Upham is the Wilf Family Professor of Property Law at NYU School of Law. In addition to property law, Prof. Upham offers courses on law and development with an emphasis on Asia. He currently serves as co-director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute.

Prof. Upham has spent considerable time at various institutions in Asia, including as a Japan Foundation Fellow and Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in 1977, as a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at Sophia University in 1986, and as a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2003. His scholarship has focused on Japan, and he published in 2006 a Japanese language essay on the “stealth activism” of the Japanese judiciary. His book Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan received from Harvard University Press the Thomas J. Wilson Prize in 1987. More recently he has begun researching and writing about Chinese law and society and law and development generally. His 2005 Yale Law Journal essay, “Who Will Find the Defendant if He Stays with his Sheep? Justice in Rural China,” helped introduce contemporary Chinese sociolegal scholarship to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

Prof. Upham graduated from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1967 and Harvard Law School in 1974. From 1967 to 1970, Prof. Upham taught in the Department of Western Languages at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan, and was a journalist in Southeast Asia. After law school he worked as a litigator in the Office of the Attorney General in Massachusetts. Before moving to NYU in 1994, he taught at Ohio State, Harvard, and Boston College law schools.