Mark D. West (born July 26, 1968) is an American legal scholar, social scientist, and academic serving as the Nippon Life Professor of Law at the University of Michigan since 2003[1][clarification needed][2] and the David A.

Between practice and academia, he was awarded an Abe Fellowship by the Social Science Research Council at the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law, where he studied with Hideki Kanda.

He led a significant expansion of the school's diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, including the creation of an alumni-majority advisory board on Race and Racism, the establishment of a named deanship devoted to racial justice issues, the launching of the school's first diversity, equity, and inclusion strategic plan, and the addition of faculty whose research examines race-related legal issues and teach race-related courses.

Prior to joining the University of Michigan, his research examined the role of law and norms in such areas as the shareholder derivative suit,[17] the Japan Sumo Association,[18] and Sokaiya corporate racketeers.

[19] This work helped form a basis for his first book, Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules (with Curtis J. Milhaupt), which Anderson say "marks a new era in the field of comparative Japanese law and cements the two authors as the doyens of this ‘Next Generation’.

His book Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide, and Statutes was widely and positively reviewed across multiple disciplines.

"[27] Relying on what political scientist Le Blanc calls "eclectic" methods, West "’loses’ cell phones, interviews love-hotel employees, talks with survivors of failed suicide attempts, examines records in police and local government archives, and, when data permits, even conducts simple quantitative analyses," creating a "marvelously sane reminder of the value of being painstaking and rigorous and the silliness of hewing too closely to any methodological or theoretical dogma.

"[28] One chapter of the book, based largely on a Law and Society Review article in which West analyzes the laws and norms regarding returning lost property in Japan,[29] continues to receive significant attention many years later in the popular press, including Bloomberg,[30] the BBC,[31] the Los Angeles Times,[32] the Wall Street Journal,[33] and Slate.

[34] Following the success of Law in Everyday Japan, West turned his attention to the comparative study of scandal, which was also broadly read across disciplines.

Among legal scholars, Upham calls Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: The Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States "deliciously entertaining" and says that West is "encyclopedic in his knowledge of popular culture in both countries,"[35] while Lee calls the book a "must-read for comparativists and all students and scholars of contemporary East Asian law and society,"[36] and Liebman says "we should delight in the details of scandal and seediness.

"[45] Selected books: • Economic Organizations and Corporate Governance in Japan: The Impact of Formal and Informal Rules, Curtis J. Milhaupt, co-author.

The Dark Side of Private Ordering: An Institutional and Empirical Analysis of Organized Crime, 67 University of Chicago Law Review 41.