James is a lecturer at the ANU College of Law. Before this he was a Project Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo (2015-2020) and Associate Professor at Sophia University (2020-2022), where he remains a Visiting Lecturer. He has also held visiting academic positions at Meiji University and Waseda University in Tokyo. James read Law at the University of Oxford (St Catherine’s College) and is completing a PhD as an external candidate at Utrecht University. James primarily works at the intersection of equity, comparative private law, and Japanese legal studies, with supplementary research profiles in applied jurisprudence, comparative legal theory, law and sexuality, and law and the humanities (with a substantive focus on contemporary Japanese culture). His published scholarship in doctrinal private law appears in leading generalist and specialist journals and has been cited by courts of final appeal in New Zealand and Singapore and by Parliamentary law reform commissions in the United Kingdom. He is the author of forthcoming monographs Law and Literature in Japan and Civilising the Trust: The Japanese Trust as Legal Transplant (in preparation).