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.
