Matsumoto is an Associate Professor of administrative law and environmental law at Osaka School of International Public Policy, Osaka University, Japan. His current research areas include natural resources law (with special focus on water law), risk regulation, and disaster law.

Professor Matsumoto received his LL. B. degree from the University of Tokyo Faculty of Law in 1996. He worked in a bank for a year and nine months before he undertook the Master course at the University of Tokyo Graduate Schools of Law and Politics (master of law) and finished his course work for Ph.D. at the Sophia University Graduate School of Law in 2004. Professor Matsumoto was appointed as a Lecturer of administrative law in 2004, promoted to an associate professor in 2007, and transferred to Osaka University in 2012. Meanwhile, Professor Matsumoto spent an extra year in public high school in Idaho on an exchange program, Youth for Understanding. He was also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley School of Law from March 2010 to March 2011 on the Excellent Young Researcher Overseas Visit Program of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

Professor Matsumoto became interested in risk management in general after the burst of the “bubble economy” in Japan in the early 1990s and his family’s experiencing of the Hanshin earthquake in 1995. His interests have become more focused on environmental law whilst working for the bank; he thus left the job and went back to school. He was fascinated first by the discussion on the Clean Air Act Amendments of the United States from deliberative democracy perspective; and later by “an alternative theory of environmental law” after reading major works of water law by Professor Yozo Watanabe (pioneer of water law in Japan) and Professor Joe Sax, and Governing the Commons by Professor Elinor Ostrom. Since then, Professor Matsumoto has been dedicated to water law, environmental law and disaster law to find his own theoretical framework.

Professor Matsumoto’s published books include The “Commons in Transition” (2012, co-edited with Teruyuki Shinbo); and “Legal Perspective of the Governance of River Basins” in Governance of Waters (2008, Koichiro Kuraji ed., in Japanese). His published articles include “Risk Society and Precautionary Principle in Environmental Law” (2010, in Japanese) and “A Deliberation on the Governance of River Basins in the United States” (2009, in Japanese, on the water dispute in the Klamath River Basin).

In addition, Professor Matsumoto’s major presentations include Groundwater Rights and Their Regulations by Local Ordinances in Japan at 19th Annual Conference and Meeting of Groundwater Resources Association 2010 (in English, poster presentation); Disaster Risk Management of River Basins: an Implication from the Governance of the Yodo River Basin (in Japanese), Conference of Public Policy Studies Association 2009.