Disability Rights Advocacy and Legalism in South Korea and Japan

Disability rights advocates in South Korea and Japan have accessed the courts to address an array of disability rights issues, from barriers to political participation and forced sterilization in Japan to the inaccessibility of inter-city buses and forced labor on salt farms in South Korea. On February 4th, from 12:20 to 1:20pm U.S. Eastern time, in Harvard Law School's Morgan Courtroom, located on the third floor of Austin Hall, HPOD and the East Asian Legal Studies program will co-host a talk by Professor Celeste Arrington, who will analyze the emergence of legalism in South Korea and Japan, through comparisons of recent reforms related to disability discrimination and accessibility.

This talk's focus will be the specific contributions to the trend towards legalism in Japan and Korea by disability "cause" lawyers. As Professor Arrington has described elsewhere, this growing cohort of legal advocates have drafted and deliberated new legislation, lobbied for policy changes, enhanced the capacity of disabled persons’ organizations, investigated human rights conditions, established mechanisms for remedying rights violations, monitored compliance with the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and represented persons with disabilities in court. Not only have these efforts helped to advance the rights of persons with disabilities, they have also made an impact on South Korea's and Japan's legal systems more broadly.

As chronicled in Professor Arrington's forthcoming book, From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society), in addition to important disability rights gains, disability rights advocates have made notable contributions to the emergence of more formal rules and participatory policymaking and enforcement, including through the courts. These markers of emerging legal formalism represent a change since governance in both countries was long known for relying on vague laws, bureaucratic discretion, and nonbinding exhortations. While existing studies of legalism and the broader judicialization of politics tend to offer top-down or structural explanations, Professor Arrington's forthcoming book traces how activists and lawyers are contributing to the legalistic turn in regulatory style from the bottom up by demanding more detailed and enforceable legal frameworks and using them in court.

Professor Arrington is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (GW). She directs the GW Institute for Korea Studies and co-directs the East Asia National Resource Center. She specializes in comparative public policy, law and social change, lawyers, and governance, with a regional focus on the Koreas and Japan. She is also interested in Northeast Asian security, North Korean human rights, and transnational activism. Her first book was Accidental Activists: Victim Movements and Governmental Accountability in Japan and South Korea (Cornell, 2016). She has published numerous articles and she co-edited Rights Claiming in South Korea with Patricia Goedde (Cambridge, 2021). She has been a fellow at the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. Her scholarship has received several awards, including the GW Office of the Vice President for Research's Early Career Research Scholar Award (2021) and the Asian Law and Society Association’s distinguished article award (2023) for her article with Claudia Kim, "Knowledge production through legal mobilization: Environmental activism against the U.S. military bases in East Asia." She received a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, an M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge, and an A.B. from Princeton University.

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