Dr Joyman Lee
- Lecturer (School of Law)
email:
Joyman.Lee@glasgow.ac.uk
School of Law, Room 530, Stair Building, 5-9 The Square, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0617-6827Biography
Raised in London, Joyman holds a BA (starred double first) in history from Cambridge and a PhD in history from Yale University (2013). He taught for three years as an assistant professor in the US. He received his GDL from City University and LLM in international commercial law and PhD (2022) in private law from University College London. He spent a year at Sciences Po in Paris, and has been a visiting scholar at McGill University in Canada. He will be a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University as a Taiwan Fellow and the University of Tokyo in 2024. He has also undertaken a shorter visit to Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal.
Research interests
Joyman's interests focus on private law, specifically trusts and property, in comparative and historical contexts. In particular, he is interested in civil law countries in Asia and Africa.
Joyman is writing a monograph entitled The Law of Express Trusts in Japan and Taiwan: Comparisons with Common Law and Quebec, on the basis of his doctoral thesis at UCL. Despite the trust's image as a niche financial institution in the civil law context, the adoption of common law forms such as trusts has always played a vital role in the development of civil law in Northeast Asian countries. As Joyman argues in a chapter contribution to Modern Studies in Property Law, Volume 12, these trusts go further than European civil law trusts by providing elaborate mechanisms for express trusts to perform their role as agreement-based institutions designed to deliver flexibility to property owners. The book challenges the notion that express trusts are dependent on Equity as a source of law by highlighting that Northeast Asian legal systems are able to support effective express trusts with only specific modifications of the underlying rules of property and succession laws.
Another of Joyman’s interests concerns private law in Africa, with an initial focus on land in Senegambia/Senegal. In Africa, legal systems are inherently pluralistic, owing to complex interactions between (often hastily) transplanted “modern” law and customary law recognised to various degrees of formality. Through a historically-driven comparison within the continent and with Asia, he hopes to explore more deeply the ways in which Afro-Asian legal orders handle their normative limitations and soften relationships of dependence with Euro-American law in efforts at renewal and reform.
In addition to English, Joyman uses Chinese, Japanese (Stanford Inter-University Center, and graduate seminars at the University of Tokyo) and French in his work.
Born to a family from a Commonwealth jurisdiction (since 1898) in a region that is predominantly civil law, Joyman's interest in the latter shaped his earlier career as a US-based historian, where his research examined transfers of ideas in relation to economic development from Japan to China at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the dissertation stage, the research was shortlisted for a field-wide prize.
Grants
Taiwan Fellowship, Ministry of Foreign Affairs
U of G: John Robertson Bequest
Travel grants to attend the Asian Law Junior Faculty Workshop at the Centre for Asian Legal Studies, National University of Singapore, and the Global Scholars Academy at the Institute for Global Law & Policy, Harvard Law School
UCL: Peter Birks Scholarship in Private Law (£54,000 + tuition fees), Master of the Rolls Scholarship for the top applicant from a Commonwealth country (LLM), Pump Court Tax Chambers Prize for the best results in international & commercial trusts law (LLM)
Inner Temple: Major Scholarship (GDL)
History: Yale Graduate School Fellowship & Overbrook History Fellowship, Japan Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Richard U Light Fellowship (Yale), Allan Prize for History (Clare College, Cambridge)
Kennedy Scholarship, United Kingdom (declined)
Supervision
Jean Tzu-Yin Chou (Economic & Social History), “Ethnic politics, local mobility, and medical management in Singapore under British Colonisation and Japanese Occupation"
- Chou, Jean Tzu-Yin
Local mobility, medical management, and the founding of hospitals by the Chinese communities in the Straits-Settlements-era Singapore, circa. 1826-1942
Teaching
Common Law LLB: Equity & Trusts (convenor), Land Law
Scots Law LLB: Property Law (trusts)
Other teaching: Advanced Property & Trusts, Commercial Law (Honours), Comparative Private Law, Issues in Commercial Equity; Law and Society in Modern China and Japan (Sciences Po Le Havre Campus)
