Robert Barker/University Photography

Annelise Riles, speaking on campus in 2012.

In March 2012, Cornell Law School’s Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture launched Meridian 180, an academic project to benefit current students, legal professionals and academics who wish to think more deeply about comparative questions, and to work together to address legal and policy problems affecting the Asia-Pacific region. Meridian 180 is a community of prominent academics, practitioners and policymakers in Asia, the United States and elsewhere interested in new ways of thinking about law, markets and politics.

“From diplomatic disputes to trade wars, there are so many issues that we, as a creative and committed group of experts representing the true diversity of the Asia-Pacific region, can address,” says Annelise Riles, the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Far East Law and Culture and founder and director of the project. “Meridian 180 will grow in the next five years to become a leading voice for peace and stability in the region, and a leading incubator of new approaches to seemingly intractable policy problems.”

Meridian 180 operates an online platform where members converse in four languages – Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean – and has hosted 11 forums during the past year, allowing an international, interdisciplinary and intergenerational group of intellectuals to share insights on questions such as: “How do multinational organizations overcome ambiguities inherent in language and law?” or “How should we understand the effects of the investor-state dispute settlement provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement?”

“Through these discussions, among leaders in a range of fields in each country, Meridian 180 strives to generate practical, and sometimes unexpected, solutions to some of the most difficult problems in the Asia-Pacific region,” Riles says.

During the past 12 months, Meridian 180 has:

• hosted a Tokyo workshop on the comparative history of U.S. and Japanese tax policy;
• co-hosted a New York City symposium, “Changing Politics of Central Banks,” with the Cornell Law School International Law Journal;
• co-hosted the “Comparative Law in the Globalized World Transmigration and Innovation” conference with Qinghua University in Beijing;
• participated in the “East Asian Law and Society Conference” at Jiaotong University in Shanghai; and
• organized a brainstorm session with Australian members at the University of Sydney.

With a conference on compensation for sexual slavery during World War II slated for Seoul in November and a conference on the politics of central banking scheduled for Ithaca in July 2014, Meridian 180 expects to continue to increase its contribution to legal and policy problems affecting the region.

Meridian 180 is also strengthening Cornell Law School’s ties with members of the Cornell University community interested in the Asia-Pacific region. The East Asia Program has provided financial support for Korean language translation and will publish Meridian 180’s multilingual e-book series on financial, environmental and political crisis later this year and will feature essays and comments posted on Meridian 180’s website.

Naruhito Cho is a postdoctoral associate for the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture at the Law School.