Mark D. West (born July 26, 1968) is an American legal scholar, social scientist, and academic leader serving as the Nippon Life Professor of Law at the University of Michigan since 2003 and the David A. Breach Dean of Law from 2013 to 2023. He is the 17th dean of the University of Michigan Law School.
West, known as a "prolific and brilliant legal scholar," is widely published on the subjects of Japanese law, the Japanese legal system, and comparative law, and has long been regarded as an American authority in these areas.
Education and early career
West earned a B.A. from Rhodes College in International Studies and a J.D. from Columbia University, where he studied with Walter Gellhorn. He clerked for Eugene Nickerson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York and practiced transactional law in New York City and Tokyo with the multinational law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Between practice and academia, he was awarded an Abe Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, where he studied with Hideki Kanda. West was named assistant professor at the University of Michigan Law School in 1998, and was appointed Nippon Life Professor of Law in 2003. He has presented, conducted research, and taught at several Japanese institutions, most frequently at Kyoto University (2000, 2001–2002, 2003, 2005), where he was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Visiting Scholar and a Fulbright Research Scholar.
Early administrative service
In 1998, West founded the University of Michigan Law School's Japanese Legal Studies Program. From 2003 to 2008, West served simultaneously as Director of the University of Michigan Law School's Center for International and Corporate Law and the University of Michigan's multidisciplinary Center for Japanese Studies (CJS), the oldest such center in the country. His five-year term as CJS's 16th director is the longest consecutive term of service since the center's founding in 1947. From 2008 to 2013, he served as Michigan Law's Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
Deanship
West was appointed Dean of the Law School effective September 1, 2013. Among his achievements as dean, he significantly expanded and diversified the faculty, including the hiring of a record 21 new faculty members in 2022. Working with students, employers, and alumni, he established a summer funding guarantee for all first-year students that was the most expansive in the country at the time of its creation. He created and launched several new initiatives, including the Law and Mobility Program; the Master of Advanced Corporation Law degree; the Veterans’ Clinic; the Workers’ Rights Clinic; and the Problem Solving Initiative, an interdisciplinary, university-wide platform for developing solutions to difficult challenges facing business and society. West led the school's successful fundraising efforts in the Victors for Michigan campaign, with donors giving over $200 million to the school. He led a significant expansion of the school's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, including the creation of an alumni-majority advisory board on Race and Racism, the establishment of a named deanship devoted to racial justice issues, the launching of the school's first diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan, and the addition of faculty whose research examines race-related legal issues and teach race-related courses.
In 2022, joining several other law schools, West announced the decision that "it no longer makes sense for Michigan Law to participate in the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings process."
Research
West's research is broadly multidisciplinary and focuses on Japanese law and the Japanese legal system.
West's early work focused on corporate governance and law and economics. Prior to joining the University of Michigan, his research examined the role of law and norms in such areas as the shareholder derivative suit, the Japan Sumo Association, and Sokaiya corporate racketeers. This work helped form a basis for his first book, Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules (with Curtis J. Milhaupt), which Anderson say "marks a new era in the field of comparative Japanese law and cements the two authors as the doyens of this ‘Next Generation’."