John Owen Haley is an internationally recognized scholar of comparative and Japanese law. His 1991 book, Authority without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox, and his article, "The Myth of the Reluctant Litigant," are considered leading works in the field. His most recent books include two casebooks: a new edition in two volumes (2010 and forthcoming) of The Civil Law Tradition: Europe, Latin America and East Asia (Charlottesville: Michie Company, 1994) and Fundamentals of Transnational Litigation: The United States, Canada, Japan, and the European Union (New Providence, N.J.: LexisNexis, 2012, 2nd ed. 2014). His other most notable publications include Legal Innovations in Asia: Judicial Lawmaking and the Influence of Comparative Law (Cheltenham, UK and Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014), edited with Toshiko Takenaka; Antitrust in Germany and Japan: The First Fifty Years, 1947-1998 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), the first comparative study of German and Japanese antitrust law in English; and The Spirit of Japanese Law, (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998, paperback ed. 2006). His most recent publication is Law's Political Foundations: Rivers, Rifles, Rice, and Religion (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016).
In addition to introductory courses on Japanese and Korean law, he has taught comparative law (focusing on France, Germany, Italy, and Spain in Western Europe, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico in Latin America, and Indonesia, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand in East Asia), transnational litigation, contracts and administrative law. Before joining Vanderbilt's law faculty, Professor Haley retired from Washington University's law faculty, where he was the William R. Ortwein Distinguished Professor of Law and director of the Whitney R. Harris Institute for Global Legal Studies from 2002-07. Before joining the law faculty at Washington University, he had served as the Garvey, Schubert and Barer Professor of Law and International Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He has taught and lectured internationally in Australia, Colombia, China, Germany, Japan, Lithuania, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand.