Crafting a Sovereign People: Constitutional Founding in Korea and Japan after WWII

This event is jointly sponsored by the Japan Program and the Korea Program at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC).

A constitution is commonly seen as the definitive expression of the sovereign will of ‘We the People.’ But, who are those sovereign people, and how does one identify them? Can we equate the Korean or Japanese ethnic nation with the sovereign people of those countries? Further, when the constitution is drafted under overbearing foreign influence, as was the case in postwar Japan and postcolonial Korea, can we really say that the people are sovereign? And if the new constitution fails to categorically reject the evils of the past, as is often claimed to be the case in Korea and Japan, is the project of constitutional founding somehow compromised? Using the historical experience of these two countries, Prof. Hahm will engage in a reflection on the soundness of the theoretical framework that informs our thinking about the relationship between popular sovereignty and constitution making.

Chaihark Hahm is Professor of Law at Yonsei University School of Law in Seoul, Korea. He teaches and writes on constitutional theory, comparative constitutional law, Confucian political theory, Korean legal culture and history, citizenship education, and human rights. Dr. Hahm received his legal training from both Korea and the United States: Seoul National University (LL.B. 1986), Yale (LL.M. 1987), Columbia (J.D. 1994), and Harvard (S.J.D. 2000). He also studied theology at Yale Divinity School (M.A.R. 1989).  He is currently based in Stanford during the 2016-2017 academic year as a Berggruen Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has held previous fellowships at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and The Hague Institute for the Internationalization of Law (2009-2010) and the National Endowment for Democracy (2001-2002).  Dr. Hahm is co-author (with Sung Ho Kim) of Making We the People: Democratic Constitutional Founding in Postwar Japan and South Korea (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and co-editor (with Daniel A. Bell) of The Politics of Affective Relations: East Asia and Beyond (Lexington Books, 2004). He is an editorial board member of I•CON: International Journal of Constitutional Law, and his works have appeared in American Journal of Comparative Law, Journal of Democracy, and I•CON, among others.