Ramseyer's comfort women paper unlikely to be printed in March

The journal's editor has asked Ramseyer to respond to criticism

Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer. (Screenshot from Harvard Law School website)

It looks as if the academic journal that’s supposed to carry a paper by Harvard Law School professor J. Mark Ramseyer that describes the former comfort women as voluntary prostitutes won’t be going to print in March as originally planned.

Yonhap News reported Wednesday that Eric Helland, editor of International Review of Law and Economics, which is published by Elsevier, has asked Ramseyer to respond to criticism from other scholars by Mar. 31. Since Elsevier is delaying this issue of the journal until Ramseyer provides his response, the journal probably won’t be printed until April or later.

Elsevier had originally held to its plan of publishing Ramseyer’s paper, titled “Contracting for Sex in the Pacific War,” in the March edition of the journal along with a rebuttal and a statement of concern. But now the publisher has decided to include a response from the author himself.

A number of scholars have criticized Ramseyer’s paper for its lack of evidence and for mistakes he made in reaching his conclusion. Ramseyer argued in the paper that the comfort women for the Japanese army were voluntary prostitutes, only to later admit that he hadn’t been able to find any sex work contracts for the Korean comfort women.

Scholars who tracked Ramseyer’s citations even concluded that “he has not consulted a single actual contract concluded between a Korean comfort woman, or her family, and a recruiter or a comfort station.”

Some observers think that Elsevier is delaying publication of the journal so as to give Ramseyer time to come up with a defense that can allow the journal to run his paper anyway. That has led more people to demand that the paper itself be retracted. So far, 3,010 scholars have signed a petition asking for its retraction.

By Kim So-youn, staff reporter

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