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 UCL. He spent a year at Sciences Po in Paris, and has been a visiting scholar at McGill University in Canada and Ohio University in the United States. He will be a visiting scholar at National Taiwan University and the University of Tokyo in 2024. He has also undertaken a shorter visit to Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal.
Research interests
Joyman's research focuses on the law of trusts and property, particularly from comparative and historical perspectives. While he was trained as a common lawyer, his research concerns civil laws in East Asia and Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. He also has a keen interest in inclusivity in law.
Joyman is currently writing a monograph entitled The Law of Express Trusts in Japan and Taiwan: Comparisons with Common Law and Quebec (see summary of his doctoral thesis on the BACL blog). In the absence of Equity, trusts in Japan and Taiwan are based on contract and supplemented by a restrictive regulatory architecture. Yet, these trusts go further than other 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 the English express trust is dependent on Equity as a source of law by highlighting that the Japanese and Taiwanese legal systems are able to support effective express trusts with only a limited modification of the underlying rules of property law.
An overview of the implications of the project for English trust law can be found in his chapter contribution to Modern Studies in Property Law, Volume 12.
Joyman’s other interest concerns the foundations of private law in the global South, focusing on land in Francophone sub-Saharan Africa. In Africa, land law is characterised by legal pluralism, owing to the complex interactions between an exogenously imposed “modern” law and customary law during and after formal colonisation. More so than in Europe, there is a wide gap between common law and civil law jurisdictions. Whereas legal scholars writing in English often focus on Commonwealth jurisdictions when considering the effects of colonialism, and on horizontal linkages within Europe when working from comparative private law, his work stresses the importance of transcending such a divide.
A description of his research on land law in Francophone Africa can be found on the UofG School of Law Blog.
Grants
Taiwan Fellowship (to support three months of research at National Taiwan University)
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)
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, 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 (trust law)
Honours: Advanced Property & Trusts (2021-22), Comparative Private Law (2021-23), Commercial Law (Honours)
Joyman is interested in practices aimed at increasing inclusivity in core private law teaching. In his courses, he includes cases from the Asia-Pacific region as a way of showcasing the diversity of developments in common law.
