Center for Korean Legal Studies Event
Please join us for a webinar with:
Jeong-Ho Roh, Director
Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School
Stephen Noerper, Senior Research Scholar; Senior Director, Policy and Corporate Programs
Weatherhead East Asian Institute; The Korea Society
Keith Luse, Executive Director
National Committee on North Korea
Moderated by:
Adena Meriel, Research Associate
Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School
COVID-19 has caught the world off guard, with many nations experiencing devastating outbreaks. Yet North Korea continues to declare the country is “virus free” and has resumed missile testing. How can we understand the regime’s insistence that there are no cases in North Korea? How is the virus nonetheless affecting the discussion of human rights and sanctions for the North Korean people? Join Jeong-Ho Roh, Director of the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School, Dr. Stephen Noerper, Adjunct Associate Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and Keith Luse, Executive Director of the National Committee on North Korea for a discussion about the implications of the pandemic on the Korean Peninsula and for U.S.-North Korea relations.
About the Speakers:
Jeong-Ho Roh is the Director of the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School. He was Associate Professor of law at Yonsei University from 2004-2008. He served as legal advisor to the Korean government on the KEDO North Korean Light-water Reactor Project and has visited North Korea on six occasions negotiating nuclear liability protocols for the project. A member of the New York Bar, he worked in private practice from 1988 to 1990 in New York and in Seoul from 1993 to 1994. He served as an officer in the Korean military at the Ministry of National Defense from 1990 to 1993. He presently teaches Geopolitics of Law and Conflict on the Korean Peninsula and Korean Legal System in the Global Economy at Columbia Law School. He holds a B.A. from Seoul National University (1985) and a J.D. from Columbia Law School (1988), where he served as editor for the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law. He has published in topics relating to law and unification, including a 4 volume Constitutional Handbook of Korean Unification (co-editor and contributor, 2002). He has contributed numerous book chapters on inter-Korean relations and the South and North Korean legal systems including “Making Sense of the DPRK Legal System” in The North Korean System in the Post-Cold War Era (2001), “The Legal and Institutional Approach to Inter-Korean Relations” in Inter-Korean Relations: Problems and Prospects (2004), and “Historical and Legal Perspectives on Inter-Korean Relations in a Regional and Global Context” in Inter-Korean Relations and the Unification Process in Regional and Global Contexts (2014). He is co-editor of Law and Policy on Korean Unification: Analysis and Implications (2014) and Pathways to a Peaceful Korean Peninsula: Denuclearization, Reconciliation and Cooperation (2017).
Stephen Noerper teaches Northeast Asia and Korean Peninsula relations at SIPA and in the department of political science at Columbia University. He is a Korea Society senior director for policy, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and a senior advisor to the United Nations program in support of cooperation in Northeast Asia. Previously, he was a senior fellow and director at the EastWest Institute, an associate professor of international relations at New York University, and a visiting professor at American University, the National University of Mongolia–where he was a Fulbright senior scholar–and Waseda University. Dr. Noerper was an Intellibridge vice president, State Department senior analyst, and an associate and assistant professor at the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. He was an East-West Center fellow and Washington representative for the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainable Development. The author of more than seventy publications on US policy, Korea and Northeast Asia, he has appeared widely on radio and television, to include the BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CNN, NPR and VOA and in The Wall Street Journal and other print. He holds advanced degrees from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and London School of Economics. He is a member of the National Committee on North Korea and recipient of Mongolia’s State Friendship Medal.
Keith Luse is the Executive Director of the National Committee on North Korea. In his post-Senate chapter, Keith Luse focused on East Asia and the Pacific as an independent consultant with an emphasis on Southeast Asia and North Korea, prior to becoming Executive Director of The National Committee on North Korea. While at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in addition to assisting Senator Lugar on legislative initiatives, Luse directed or participated in numerous oversight projects and investigations. They included the murder of Americans in Papua, Indonesia; corruption and transparency challenges at The Asia Development Bank and The World Bank; human rights abuses against ethnic minorities in Burma, and an evaluation of the effectiveness of U.S. foreign assistance in Cambodia and Indonesia. Luse is a member of the Advisory Board of The Center for Constitutional Democracy, Indiana University Maurer School of Law. He formerly served on the Boards of the American Center for International Leadership, The Indianapolis Museum of Indian Heritage and The Indianapolis Hispano-American Center. From 1989 to 1991 he was Chairman of the Indiana Republican Party.
Adena Meriel is a Research Fellow with the Center for Korean Legal Studies at Columbia Law School. Her research interests have focused on cyber developments in both South and North Korea, North Korean domestic law, as well as policy directives for the disputed maritime Northern Limit Line. She has received dual Masters, with her first MSc. from Oxford University in the Social Sciences of the Internet (2017), and her second M.A. from Columbia University in East Asia Regional Studies, Korean Peninsula (2018). Her Master’s theses and research have focused on assessments of internet security mechanisms in South Korea and Asia, as well as the provision of broadband to rural areas. These projects have gone on to inform policy platforms for the government, telecom companies, and think tanks in the United Kingdom as well as the United States. Her academic pursuit of Korean Studies began in Washington, D.C. where she studied and worked at the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. She graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the George Washington University with a double major in Asian Studies and International Affairs, as well as a minor in Korean Language.
EVENT DETAILS
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