Dr Konatsu Nishigai

Before joining the University of Northampton, Konatsu obtained PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law (Corpus Christi College) in March 2022. Before understaking her PhD project at the University of Cambridge, she held appointments as Associate Professor of Constitutional Law at Tokyo Metropolitan University and Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Tokyo. Before then, she obtained Juris Doctor (Magna Cum Laude) from the University of Tokyo and BA in Law from Keio University.

Konatsu reads jurisprudence and public law. Her main research interest is in the jurisprudential nature of law generated in practice, with particular focus on Common Law as judge-made law. She draws on the philosophy of language, especially the recent development in pragmatist philosophy, in making an explanatory model to show how judges as speakers can implicitly communicate new rules to later judges as hearers. Konatsu is a member of Women in Pragmatism. She also has research interests in legal reasoning and its practical application to natural language processing.