The Legal Cultures Observed By and Observed Among the Pioneers of Japanese Socio-Legal Studies

Since Professor Takeyoshi Kawashima provoked the debate by his classic work, Legal consciousness of Japanese, in 1967, theories of legal consciousness and legal culture have been kept among the issues of scholarly controversies in various fields of socio-legal studies. With an eye to the controversies on the globalization and local cultures, theories of legal culture (and legal consciousness of local population) seem to provide suggestive viewpoints for socio-legal studies on globalization and local adaptation.

I would argue that theories of legal consciousness and legal culture serve for studies on globalized law and society in two ways.

First, they would provide viewpoints for studies on legal reform and adaptations in various countries. We should keep eye on the culture and social consciousness shared by elites leading legal reforms in our empirical studies on the legal adaptation to globalization around the Pacific. We could observe what kind of legal consciousness and legal cultures the leading groups have and what kind of impact they have in molding new legal systems or institutions.

Second, they would keep their positions in the socio-legal grand theories on use of law, legal adaptation, legal conversion, and so on, though it would be difficult to test empirical validity of such theories.

I would illustrate that Japanese theories of legal culture themselves were reflection of the legal culture shared among the pioneers of Japanese socio-legal studies. I would straight up the key factors of Japanese theories on legal culture and relate them to the social and academic backgrounds and interests shared among the pioneers of Japanese socio-legal studies. I would also try to reconstruct theoretical framework, in which legal consciousness and legal culture serve as key factors for our contemporary empirical studies.