Visiting Scholars

Carsten Gerner-Beuerle

Professor of Commercial Law
University College, London

Carsten Gerner-Beuerle joined University College London as a professor of commercial law in 2017. Prior to this, he worked at the London School of Economics, King’s College London, and Humboldt University Berlin. Carsten holds degrees in law and economics from Humboldt University Berlin, the University of Minnesota, and the University of London. He has also held visiting positions at various institutions in Europe, the United States, and Asia, including Trinity College Dublin, Heidelberg University, Duke University, and the University of Auckland. Carsten is admitted to the bar in Germany and the United Kingdom, regularly advises a German law firm on matters of corporate law and corporate insolvency, and has prepared studies for the European Commission and the European Parliament on the reform of corporate governance, financial regulation, and private international law. He is also a research member of the European Corporate Governance Institute (ECGI) and a principal investigator on a Leverhulme-Trust-funded project on responsible AI.

Josephat Kilonzo

Lecturer
Strathmore Law School, Nairobi Kenya

Josephat Kilonzo is a lecturer at Strathmore Law School (SLS) in Nairobi Kenya. In addition to teaching, he currently serves as the director of the Strathmore Institute of Advanced Studies in International Criminal Justice (SIASIC). He has a keen interest in international human rights law, democratization, governance, African regional integration and peace and security. In 2017, he was awarded the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Scholarship to pursue an LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa at the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa. He is admitted to the bar in Kenya and an advocate of the High Court of Kenya.

Dan Meagher

Professor and Chair in Law
Deakin Law School, Australia

Dan Meagher is Professor and Chair in Law at the Deakin Law School in Australia, teaching and researching in constitutional law and statutory interpretation. Dan is visiting Notre Dame Law School as part of the Global Visiting Professors program where his undertaking research on the capacity and prudence of the High Court of Australia developing a void-for-vagueness doctrine.

Dan has published his scholarship widely in Australian and international law journals, co-edited The Principle of Legality in Australia and New Zealand (Federation Press, 2017) with Professor Matthew Groves, The Legal Protection of Rights in Australia (Hart, 2019) with Professor Groves and Dr Janina Boughey and is co-author of a leading casebook - Hanks Australian Constitutional Law: Materials and Commentary (11th ed, 2021). He is Director of Research in the Deakin Law School, a member of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law, comments editor for the Public Law Review and an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Law.

Anastasia Iliopoulou-Penot

Professor of Public Law
University Paris Panthéon-Assas, France

Anastasia Iliopoulou-Penot is Professor of Public Law at the University Paris Panthéon-Assas (France), specializing in European Union Law. She also teaches at Sciences Po Paris. She holds a PhD degree from the University Paris Panthéon-Assas and a law degree from the University of Athens (Greece). She has been an academic visitor at the University of Oxford (Institute of European and Comparative Law) and a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po Paris (Centre for European Studies).

Professor Iliopoulou-Penot has taught at the Universities of Humboldt-Berlin, King’s College London, Athens, La Sapienza-Rome, Amsterdam and Sorbonne-Abu Dhabi. She has written extensively on legal issues related to European citizenship, the internal market and the protection of liberal values and fundamental rights in the European Union. Her recent research focuses on these issues in the context of digitalisation and explores how the EU regulation in the digital sector and the case law of the Court of justice of the EU progressively give rise to a European digital citizenship and a European digital Constitution.

Makoto Kawami

Professor
Aoyama Gakuin University, Japan

Makoto Kawami, Ph.D., is Professor at Aoyama Gakuin University of Japan, faculty of department of Community Studies. He served as Vice President (2012-2020) and President (2020-2022) at Aoyama Gakuin Women's Junior College. He is a board member of The Japan Association of Legal Philosophy.

His research interest lies in current trends in natural law theory and how it applies to critical contemporary legal issues, particularly in Japan. He deals with bioethics, social services, global issues,and others and explores the meaning and application of fundamental legal concepts such as liberty, life, welfare, equality, peace from the perspective of human dignity and care. He is also a member of the University's Civic Engagement Center, building a program and courses of Service Learning.Previously, He was a visiting scholar at Notre Dame Law School in the 1999-2000 academic year.

Koutarou Ogura

Judge
Tokyo District Court, Japan

Koutarou Ogura serves as a judge for the Tokyo District Court in Tokyo. He focuses on civil code and civil procedure, mainly dealing with civil cases that are concerned with loan repayments, the surrender of real estate, default, tort, and medical malpractice.

At Notre Dame, he is researching the way to arrange issues and the evidence (pleadings and discovery) and the forms of judgments in the United States. Civil judges in Japan tackle enormous claims and evidence submitted by the parties in the digital age, causing the average time required for deliberation to be prolonged, and consequently judgment documents tend to become longer and more complicated. Ogura seeks to improve this practice with the use of digital technologies through his research in the U.S., where the digitalization of legal proceedings is advancing. He seeks to find a key to the solution of this practical issues by learning American laws and the U.S. judicial system.

Takahide Tokumitsu

Prosecutor
Japan

Takahide Tokumitsu has been working as a Japanese prosecutor for six years. He will be studying the American legal system in order to improve the Japanese legal system.

His first research topic is the reduction of written documents and the change to electronic evidence in criminal proceedings. He is also researching policies and practices regarding the confiscation of crypto assets from criminals.

Josephine van Zeben

Professor and Chair of the Law Group
Wageningen University, The Netherlands

Josephine van Zeben is Professor and Chair of the Law group at Wageningen University (WUR, the Netherlands). She is also co-editor-in-chief of Transnational Environmental Law, visiting professor at the School of Transnational Governance of the EUI (Florence, Italy), and part of the Transdisciplinary Advisory Board of JPI Climate.

Professor van Zeben’s research focuses on the regulation of environmental issues by public and private actors across jurisdictions, with particular attention for polycentric governance theory and developments related to the European Union. She is research lead of the LAW Group's program "Law for the Living Environment". Her research draws on her teaching of law to non-law students and lawyers from foreign jurisdictions by actively searching for optimal ways of analyzing complex legal and societal problems so as to facilitate interdisciplinary solutions. She previously visited in spring 2016 and taught International Environmental Law.

Luigi Buonanno

Assistant Professor
Bocconi University, Italy

Luigi Buonanno, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor at Bocconi University (Italy), where he teaches Comparative Private Law and Introduction to the Legal System (Private Law). His main research interests revolve around contract law and civil liability, with a focus on joint and several liability and creditors' powers. He also deals with blockchain, artificial intelligence and law of online platforms. He has also been a visiting professor at Nova Law School. In 2019, he received the 2019 Young Lawyers Award from the European Law Institute. He will be teaching Law of Digital Platforms at Notre Dame Law School.