Japan is in the midst of a comprehensive reform of its judicial system, legal profession, and legal education. The ultimate goal is to make the judiciary and legal services more accessible to the public, so that members of the public will be better able to protect and promote their interests through the use of law. This is the gist of the reform proposals that were presented by the Justice System Reform Council in June 2001 after two years of deliberation. (See "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, and it 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 legal education they provide is not considered professional legal education, and no law degree is required to take the current National Law Examination. Since the quality of lawyers under the present system depends only on the competitiveness of the Law Exam, less than three percent of applicants are allowed to pass it, producing only about 1,200 new lawyers a year. This system has created two serious problems. First, the present system has kept the number of lawyers too small for the world's second largest economy. Second, since law is taught at an undergraduate level, most lawyers do not have academic backgrounds in subjects other than law, and lawyers sometimes find themselves inadequately equipped to handle 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) post-graduate professional law schools that will award a J.D. degree should be established in 2004; (2) new law schools should admit students from a wide range of academic and social backgrounds; (3) standard programs should require 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 will not require a J.D. degree will also be created; and (5) by 2010, 3,000 people should pass the new Exam annually.

These reforms are expected to produce a far larger number of versatile and resourceful lawyers. The Diet (the Japanese Parliament) passed the necessary laws in December 2002, and the Education Ministry established standards for accreditation of these 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 Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology in 2003, and the Ministry accredited 68 of them to open new professional law schools in April 2004.

Structures for new law schools vary widely from university to university. Some law schools are built within existing graduate programs of law, graduate programs which 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 who come from a wide range of backgrounds. Waseda Law School is more faithful to the vision presented by the Justice System Reform Council, and has allowed less than 10 percent of admitted students to shorten their period of study to two years.