Monday, January 5, 2015

Feely and Miyazawa on Japanese Legal Culture and the State

Malcolm M. Feeley, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, and Setsuo Miyazawa, University of California Hastings College of the Law, have posted Legal Culture and the State in Modern Japan: Continuity and Change, which originally appeared in Law, Society, and History: Themes of the Legal Sociology and Legal History of Lawrence W. Friedman, ed. Robert W. Gordon and Morton J. Horwitz (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 169-187.  Here is the abstract:    
This chapter has surveyed salient features of the legal system in Japan since the late Tokugawa period. Our purpose has been to describe the relation of the legal system to the state and to offer some observations about the autonomy of the internal legal culture of Japan. We found fundamental continuity between Tokugawa Japan and postwar Japan. It remains to be seen whether the justice system reform introduced since 2001 will produce transformations of the relationship between the state and the bar, resulting in a more assertive internal legal culture.