The Harvard University Asia Center has released
Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth-Century Japan (2013), by
Darryl E. Flaherty (University of Delaware). A description from the publisher:
Long ignored by historians and repudiated in
their time, practitioners of private law opened the way toward Japan’s
legal modernity. From the seventeenth to the turn of the twentieth
century, lawyers and their predecessors changed society in ways that
first samurai and then the state could not. During the Edo period
(1600–1868), they worked from the shadows to bend the shogun’s law to
suit the market needs of merchants and the justice concerns of peasants.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, legal practitioners changed
law from a tool for rule into a new epistemology and laid the foundation
for parliamentary politics during the Meiji era (1868–1912).
This social and political history argues that legal modernity sprouted
from indigenous roots and helped delineate a budding nation’s public and
private spheres. Tracing the transition of law regimes from Edo to
Meiji, Darryl E. Flaherty shows how the legal profession emerged as a
force for change in modern Japan and highlights its lasting
contributions in founding private universities, political parties, and a
national association of lawyers that contributed to legal reform during
the twentieth century.
