Multidisciplinary conference honors Frank Upham’s wide-ranging scholarship
NYU Law faculty members and scholars from around the world gathered on November 14 and 15 for a conference at the Law School honoring Frank Upham, Wilf Family Professor of Property Law Emeritus. More than 15 speakers presented research in the areas of comparative law, gender, and property—themes that have been central to Upham’s own work.
“His generosity, his flexibility, and his intrepidness [are] what make Frank such a special colleague and friend and teacher,” said Carol Liebman, clinical professor of law emerita at Columbia Law School, one of three luncheon speakers who offered personal recollections of Upham. “Frank is somebody whose curiosity and enthusiasm are too great to put in any single box. Look at the range of topics that have to be covered [here], how many days it’s going to take to pay tribute in this conference to all of Frank’s work and the impact he’s had in so many areas.”
Among the many scholars presenting their work at the conference were Mark Ramseyer of Harvard Law School; Gila Stopler, professor of law at the College of Law and Business, Israel; Donald Clarke, emeritus professor at the George Washington University Law School; and Nobuko Nagase, professor at Otsuma Women's University, Japan.
As Liebman noted, Upham’s career has been multidisciplinary and international in scope. He has taught property, law and development, and a variety of courses and seminars on comparative law and society with an emphasis on East Asia and the developing world. He served as faculty director of NYU Law’s Global Law School Program from 1997 to 2002. Co-founder of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute, he served as co-director until 2016.
After graduating from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University in 1967, Upham taught in the Department of Western Languages at Tunghai University in Taichung, Taiwan. He also worked as a freelance journalist in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, covering the Vietnam War for Time, Sports Illustrated, and other publications. Upham received his JD from Harvard Law School in 1974 and taught at Ohio State, Harvard, and Boston College law schools before moving to NYU Law in 1994.
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 long focused on Japan, and his book Law and Social Change in Postwar Japan—a standard reference for discussions of Japanese law and its social and political role in contemporary Japan—received the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press in 1987. More recently, he has researched and written about Chinese law and society and about the role of law in social and political development more generally. In 2024, the government of Japan awarded Upham the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, for promoting the understanding of Japanese law. “He may understand the Japanese legal system more than most lawyers in Japan since he helped shape it," Japanese Ambassador Mikio Mori said as he bestowed the award.
“Frank is an adventurer, both in his personal life and in his scholarship,” said another conference speaker, Michael Schill, former president of Northwestern University and a former NYU Law professor. “He has done pathbreaking research in comparative law of property and development—but you all know that.…Frank, throughout his career, was always ready to try new challenges. He went to Vietnam as a journalist during the war…. He traveled the world many times over…and started any number of global initiatives.”
Speaking after Schill, NYU Law President Emeritus John Sexton credited Upham with helping inspire NYU’s international growth. “I pictured his teaching as we developed the global network university concept,” said Sexton, Law School dean emeritus and Benjamin F. Butler Professor of Law. “He was an important part of encouraging me to do that.”
When Upham took the microphone a few minutes later, he talked about what NYU Law community has meant to him. “What makes a good institution…is the respect that people in that institution have for each other,” he said. “…What has made my life here, decades here, so wonderful is that when I come in the doors of Vanderbilt Hall…I look at the security people, and I know who they are, and they know who I am. And [when I’m in my office] one particular person comes around to take care of things, clean stuff, and she always says, ‘How’s the family?’”
Upham continued: “It’s being fortunate enough to be in a place where there is almost literally a network—I mean there are ties between people, not just people on the faculty and not just people in the security [staff] or not just among the students, but among the whole institution. And that’s what I learned from my time here…and I’m very grateful for what I’ve had here.”
