Ayako Hirata is an associate professor of Law & Society at the Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo. She received her Ph.D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy in 2016, and she has published two academic books on regulatory enforcement and street-level bureaucracy (both in Japanese). Her recent article is published in Regulation & Governance, titled “How Networks Among Frontline Offices Influence Regulatory Enforcement: Diffusion and Justification of interpretation of Risk.”
Her research interests lie at the intersection of state power, street-level bureaucracy, and administrative law. She is particularly interested in how laws are interpreted, reshaped, and mobilized at the frontlines of the regulatory/welfare state.
During her time at CSLS, she plans to work on government lawyers in both the US and Japan: how and to what extent they play a role in day-to-day policy implementation; what characteristics they have in terms of work motivation, professionalism, role-perceptions, and career trajectories, compared to private lawyers and; how lawyer autonomy is maintained or compromised within the hierarchical structure of government.
