Biography
Koji Higashikawa is a professor of law at Kanazawa University, Japan. He teaches Anglo-American law to Japanese students with particular emphasis on American law, and also teaches Japanese law to international students. He earned his Ph.D. with the dissertation on American election law system and minority voting rights from Kobe University Graduate School of Law in 2001, and published a dozen of academic articles in the field of election law. As a free speech scholar, he has been interested in reconciling possible conflict between free speech right of aggressive, violent, and offensive speakers and the victims of such speech. He is the author of case notes on recent cases from the Supreme Court of the United States including Snyder v. Phelps (funeral picketing), Brown v. EMA (violent video game regulation), and US v. Alvarez (false speech). He has given presentations on hate speech issue both in Japan and in the United States, one of which is “Recent Development on Hate Speech Controversy in Japan” in the Law and Society Association Annual Conference of 2015 held in Seattle where he discussed the impact of Zaitokukai case, the first judicial ruling on hate speech in Japan. His research interests include comparative analysis of judicial system as well as free speech issue and election law in the United States. He is a councilor and a member of editorial board at Japanese American Society for Legal Studies.
Previous Presentations
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | Free Speech & Hate Speech – History, Story, Narrative
