ABSTRACT
Legal education in Japan is now being re-examined, and is likely to be overhauled within a decade. This reexamination forms part of a more comprehensive scheme of restructuring the judicial system and the legal profession as a whole, proposed by the Judicial Reform Council (JRC). The JRC was established directly in the Cabinet in July 1999. By law, its mission is ‘to consider fundamental measures necessary to reform the judicial system and its infrastructure by defining the role of the administration of justice in Japan in the twenty-first century’.1 Based on its own intensive research and deliberations, the JRC released a Final Report in June 2001 that includes a recommendation to establish a new regime of legal education by the year 2004. This recommendation was coupled with a proposal to expand the number of new recruits to the legal profession annually from the present 1,000 to 3,000.2
According to the plan, a new graduate school of law, Hoka-daigakuin, popularly called ‘the Japanese style law school’, will be established subject to periodic accreditation by an appropriate third party body. The graduate school will offer a three-year program, successful completion of which would be the prerequisite for taking the national Legal Examination.3 The Legal Examination itself will have to be refurbished to reflect the teaching program of the new graduate law school. The existing Institute of Legal Research and Training will continue to function and will admit those who pass the Legal Examination, and will confer on its graduates their qualification as lawyers. Although the present law faculties and departments with their undergraduate programs of legal education will continue to operate, their curricula would have to be modified to fit the new regime of higher education. It is contemplated that on average 70 to 80 per cent of the annual graduates from the law schools would be admitted to the Institute, a big leap from the current pass rate of 3 per cent in the Legal Examination.4 On the basis of the target number of 3,000 passes per year,5 this would mean that the number of annual enrollments of all law schools combined would be something like 5,000 students.
