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  3. Konatsu Nishigai

  • PhD (Cantab), JD, BA in Law

    Before joining the the University of Northampton, Konatsu obtained PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge (Corpus Christi College) in March 2022. Her PhD research focused on the question of how judges can make new rules while genuinely following the pre-existing rules (the paradox of judge-made law). She is currently working on publishing her PhD research. Before undertaking her PhD project at Cambridge, she held appointments as Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at Tokyo Metropolitan University and as Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Tokyo. Before then, she obtained Juris Doctor (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Tokyo and BA in Law from Keio University.

    • Ethics, Discrimination and Human Rights (Law1024)
    • Graduate and Academic Skills Development (Law2039)
    • Dissertation

  • Konatsu reads jurisprudence and public law. Her main interest is in jurisprudential theory on law generated in practice, especially judge-made law, and philosophy of language, especially pragmatist philosophy, where she constructs an explanatory model to show how judges as speakers can implicitly communicate new rules to later judges as hearers. She also has research interests in legal reasoning and its application to natural language processing.

    Konatsu is a pragmatist in Women in Pragmatism.

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Konatsu Nishigai’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.

    • ‘Two Types of Formalism of the Rule of Law’, The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (Impact factor 1.7014), Volume 42, Issue 2 (2022) 495-520.