HOME > Transformation of Japan's Justice System
Japan is in the midst of a comprehensive process of reform of its legal profession, judicial and legal education systems. The ultimate goal of this reform is to make the judiciary and legal services more accessible to the public so that citizens will be better able to protect and promote their interests through the use of law. This is the basis of the reform proposals that were presented by the Justice System Reform Council in June 2001 after two years of deliberations.
(Please refer to "Recommendations of the Justice System Reform Council - For a Justice System to Support Japan in the 21st Century "). The Council considered the need for a larger number of highly educated lawyers as the basis of the entire reform process and proposed the introduction of post-graduate professional law schools in 2004 as the core of the new system for educating and training future lawyers.
Japan already has nearly 100 undergraduate law faculties. However, the education they provide is academicallyoriented and not considered professional legal education, and no law degree is required as a prerequisite for sitting the current National Law Examination. The quality of lawyers under the present system depends only on the competitive Law Exam, which allows less than three percent of applicants to pass every year. This system produces only about 1,200 new lawyers each year and has created two serious problems. Firstly, the present system has kept the number of lawyers at a level that is too small for the world's second largest economy.
Secondly, since law is taught at the undergraduate level, most lawyers do not have academic backgrounds in subjects other than law, and lawyers sometimes find their skills and experience are inadequate for handling sophisticated legal issues that require broader intellectual backgrounds in fields such as science and economics.
The Justice System Reform Council proposed dramatic changes to this situation. These include: (1) the proposed establishment of post-graduate professional law schools that award a J.D. degree in 2004; (2) the admission of students into new law schools from a wide range of academic and social backgrounds; (3) the requirement that standard programs should comprise three years of instruction, although one year may be waived for those who have already acquired a certain level of legal knowledge; (4) a J.D. degree will be the basic requirement for taking the new National Law Examination, although an alternative route for taking the new Exam that does not require a J.D. degree will also be created; and (5) 3,000 people should be passing the new Exam annually by 2010.
These reforms are expected to produce a far larger number of versatile and resourceful lawyers. The Diet (Japanese Parliament) passed the necessary laws in December 2002, and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology established standards for accreditation of legal education programs in March 2003, including a student-faculty ratio of no more than 15 to 1 and a requirement that at least 20 percent of full-time faculty members should have had at least five years of practical experience. Seventy-two universities submitted applications for accreditation to the Education Ministry in 2003 and the Ministry accredited 68 of them to open new professional law schools in April 2004. In April 2011, there are 74 law schools in Japan.
The structures of new law schools vary widely between universities. Some law schools are built within existing graduate programs of law, and the graduate programs themselves are established on the basis of undergraduate law faculties. These law schools have admitted a large number of students to their two-year, shortened programs.
We believe that such a format seriously undermines the goal of new law schools to provide deeper and broader legal education to students with a wide range of backgrounds. Waseda Law School is more faithful to the vision presented by the Justice System Reform Council, and has allowed about 50 admitted students who have academic backgrounds in subjects other than law or work experience more than two years.
