Public Panel – Constitutional Stories: Legal Histories of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians
1:00 pm – 4:00 pm
Sunday, December 2, 2018
Free and open to the public
Nikkei National Museum, main hall
6688 Southoaks Crescent, Burnaby, BC
Constitutions are stories the nation tells about itself. The histories of Japanese Americans and Japanese Canadians reveal that many chapters of those stories involve oppression, racism, and injustice. And yet, constitutions are also built, maintained, and transformed in moments of constitutional failure, resistance, and faith in constitutional ideals. Our panel will explore a diverse array of constitutional stories involving Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans and explore the important role of communities of Japanese descent in the constitutional history of Canada and the United States.
Chair: Masako Iino
Professor Iino of Tsuda College in Tokyo has the distinction of being the first woman and the first scholar from outside North American to win the Governor General’s International Award in Canadian Studies. A founding member of the Japanese Association for Canadian Studies, she developed her interest in Canada in the late 1970s when she expanded her study of the United States to include its northerly neighbor.
Panelists:
Eric Muller
Professor Muller is the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. He edited Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in WWII as well as authoring American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II and Free to Die for their Country: The Story of Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II.
Amanda Tyler
Amanda Tyler is a Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law. Professor Tyler’s research and teaching interests include the Supreme Court, federal courts, constitutional law, civil procedure, and statutory interpretation. Her book, Habeas Corpus in Wartime: From the Tower of London to Guantanamo Bay, was published in 2017.
Brian Hayashi
Professor Hayashi teaches US History and Japan at Kent State University and is interested in race and ethnicity, as it applies to Asian Americans, from their initial arrival in the late 19th century to the present, with most of his focus centering around World War II. Religion, diasporic politics, intelligence/espionage, racial ideology are the subjects of his research. His award winning books include American Internment in 2004 and, in 1995, Assimilation, Nationalism, and Protestantism among the Japanese in Los Angeles, 1895-1942.
Eric Adams
Eric Adams is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Alberta and has been leading the legal history research team for Landscapes of Injustice since 2014. A Canadian constitutional historian specializing in the history of rights, Adams has published in Canada’s leading law journals including “Promises of Law: The Unlawful Dispossession of Japanese Canadians,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal 54, 3 (2017) with Dr. Jordan Stanger-Ross that won two separate awards from the Canadian Historical Association, as the Best Article in Political History and the Best Article in the History of Migration, Ethnicity, and Transnationalism.