“Were Comfort Women Voluntarily Employed?”: Fact-Checking of Harvard Professor’s Denial of War Crime

In December 2021, Harvard Law School Professor J. Mark Ramseyer published a paper denying Japan’s war crimes during World War II in the International Review of Law and Economics (IRLE). In this paper, he claimed that ‘comfort women’ were voluntarily employed prostitutes under the terms of a contract. By employing textual analysis of news articles and academic papers dealing with Mr. Ramseyer’s claims, this study investigated how South Korean journalists, and global scholars have fact-checked and verified Ramseyer’s paper and his claims. Two groups adjudicated the truthfulness of Mr. Ramseyer’s claims and unmistakably declared his claims as “false.” Mr. Ramseyer’s paper served as a valuable case for both global journalists and scholars to unite and take action to verify false and misleading claims. This movement presents the possibility that collaborative fact-checking between journalists and scholars can be utilized and employed for other global issues.