Role: Professor of Law, Seoul National University; Director, Center for Public Interests and Human Rights, SNU Law Research Institute; 2019 VHC Visiting Scholar
Seoul, South Korea

  Contact: hyang@snu.ac.kr

  Research Interests:
Family Law in Korea | Colonialism and Question of Tradition | Methodology for Representing Testimony | Reproductive Rights | Social Science in Law

Dr. Hyunah Yang is Professor of Law at Seoul National University (SNU) School of Law where she has taught Gender and Law and Sociology of Law. As a first female professor of law at SNU, one of the most prestigious universities in the country and as a former Ph.D. candidate guided by Professor Fineman's supervising, Dr. Yang has engaged with various issues domestically and transnationally for decades.

She made major contributions to the abolition of the 'Family-head system' in Korea’s Civil Code and the related registration system of Korean people, finalized by the Constitutional Court decision held in Korea (2003). In 2005, Professor Yang began organizing the 'Korean Research Association of Gender and Law,' now a nation-wide organization. She was also the first legal scholar to introduce and affirm the notion of 'reproductive rights' in the country from 2005. She served as an expert witness at the Constitutional Court in the case regarding the criminal codes that criminalized abortion for over 50 years. In this case, the two articles were finally decided as being "incompatible with Korean Constitution" in April 2019 (refer to her article at Reproductive Health Law, https://reprohealthlaw.wordpress.com/2019/06/).

Professor Yang has long been engaged with the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery. In addition to researching victim-survivors' testimony, Professor Yang has sought for the feminist legal reasoning to explain the unprecedented violence against women in Asia under the war and colonialism. She played the role of country prosecutor at the "Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japanese Military Sexual Slavery" held in Tokyo, Japan in 2000. She was a commissioner of the National Human Rights Commission of Korea and has participated in various governmental committees.

Professor Yang is currently director of the 'Center for Public Interests and Human Rights' at the SNU Law Research Institute and was previously a director of Gender Research Institute at SNU. Among her publications are ‘A Journey of Family Law Reform in Korea: Tradition, Equality, and Social Change’ (Journal of Korean Law, 2009); ‘Finding “Map of Memory”: Testimonies of Japanese Sexual Slavery Survivors’ (Positions, 2008); ‘"Multicultural Families" in South Korea: A Socio-Legal Approach’ (N. Carolina Journal of Intl. Law, 2011); and edited volume ‘Law and Society in Korea’ (Edgar Elgar Publisher, 2013).