Bio

Takumi Nishimura is a visiting scholar from Japan. Before coming to the U.S., he served as a judge for 7 years. He has extensive practical experiences across civil law cases, administrative law cases, family court cases, juvenile cases, bankruptcy cases, provisional remedy cases and civil execution cases, though most of his career has been in criminal cases.

During his one-year visit sponsored by his home country, he is researching the future influence of technological innovation on Japanese judicial system. His research focuses on judicial authority and the justification of judicial decisions - a field connected to legal philosophy, rule of law and constitutional law. In order for his research, he uses a comparative method, investigating the actual conditions of local judiciaries and considering judicial history, informed by his own practical experience.

Shortly after graduating from Kyoto University in 2016, he earned remarkably high mark (11th out of 6000) on the 2017 bar exam. After a one-year training term as a legal apprentice, he has served as a judge since 2019 in multiple district courts in western Japan (Under the Japanese judicial system, most judges are appointed from legal apprentices and spend most of their careers as a judge).