ABSTRACT
Legal education within the university has since been primarily at the undergraduate level, but, except for certain periods, undergraduate legal education itself has not entitled graduates to pursue a professional legal career as a “full jurist”, either as a member of the practicing bar, as a judge or as a prosecutor. The National Legal Examination and the subsequent Legal Training and Research Institute training, as the exclusive way of entering the legal profession, have a certain impact on legal education in the universities. Japanese legal education at the undergraduate level produces overwhelmingly non-lawyers, more exactly non-“full jurists”. Graduate legal education within universities has been a source of many problems since its inception after the war. Japanese legal education in a formal sense began when the new Meiji government invited foreign teachers after 1868 to train the upper echelons of the new central bureaucracy.
