Researcher Spotlight: Joyman Lee

Joyman Lee is a private law scholar whose interests focus on equity & trusts and property. As a comparative scholar, his work engages with the interactions between common law and civil law, with a particular interest in Asian jurisdictions such as Japan and Taiwan.

What project are you working on that excites you?

I'm a comparative private lawyer, and I'm currently working on a book monograph based on my PhD that compares express trusts in England, Japan and a couple of other places (the mixed legal systems of Scotland and Quebec, and Taiwan). Part of the project involves trying to understand trusts more deeply from the local civil law taxonomy (e.g. in relation to property, succession, gains-based remedies). I'm not trained as a civil lawyer so this has been a challenge to say the least!

I am also developing a side interest in land law in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically French (or Wolof)-speaking Senegal in West Africa. I'm not completely sure how this limb of my work will evolve now that I'm geographically much further from that region, although seeing private law from non-European perspectives intrigues me. I don't know if this means that I'll gradually become drawn to indigenous perspectives here in Australia.

What do you hope to achieve with your research/impact & engagement in the next year?

I'll focus in my first year on adapting to teaching here at UNSW especially as I hear that students find equity & trusts a tricky subject (as they do elsewhere). Research-wise I want to continue making progress on the book project: I spent half a year in Asia last year and am still to look closely at what I have collected in Japan and Taiwan.

What research/impact & engagement achievement are you most proud of and why?

I'm proud of being able to engage with the Japanese legal scholarly community, which is a point of connection between my legal work with my past life as a historian (the University of Tokyo remains the only institution where I have spent time both as a historian and a legal scholar). I was able to present at the modestly-named "private law get together" at the University of Tokyo last December, where one of the professors whose class I attended remarked that I was only the second scholar to have delivered my seminar in Japanese in his two decades there (and I was only allowed to do so after my host professor placed me under close surveillance for a month!).

Do you have a regular research practice that you can share?

As a comparative scholar a substantial part of my work involves reading legal and other academic texts in foreign languages. Keeping up these languages as a non-native speaker is one of my main challenges (at times it aggravates imposter syndrome, as language work isn't strictly speaking "law") at an everyday level, and mainly involves following news in faraway places. As I only got into French in my thirties (and lived in Paris only during the pandemic, when my daily practice was restricted to "deux pains au chocolat, svp"), it feels even more difficult than Japanese.