Making Lawyers (and Gangsters) in Japan

How insulting to have juxtaposed lawyers and gangsters in the title, to hint that lawyers are not engaged in a supremely noble profession, to insinuate a commonality between counselors-at-law and godfathers. There will be no explicit comparisons here, for this is an Essay about Japanese legal education, not La Cosa Nostra. Instead I offer a description of how Japan trains its lawyers and what lawyers in Japan do. I\u27ll also talk a bit about how gangsters in Japan are trained, and what they do. Perhaps a serendipitous connection will present itself. I begin by briefly discussing the old system of training Japanese lawyers and some of the forces that led to the breakdown of that system. I then detail and analyze the new system, much of which was borrowed from the United States after careful investigation. Finally, I offer a few words about Japanese gangsters, the yakuza. It\u27s not impossible that the story suggests similarities between lawyers and their illegal counterparts

Private Ordering at the World\u27s First Futures Exchange

Modern derivative securities - financial instruments whose value is linked to or derived from some other asset - are often sophisticated, complex, and subject to a variety of rules and regulations. The same is true of the derivative instruments traded at the world\u27s first organized futures exchange, the Dojima Rice Exchange in Osaka, Japan, where trade flourished for nearly 300 years, from the late seventeenth century until shortly before World War II. This Article analyzes Dojima\u27s organization, efficiency, and amalgam of legal and extralegal rules. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of literature on commercial self-regulation while shedding new light on three areas of legal and economic theory

A measure of honor

People in Japan sue despite low damages—and win—over some things that sound rather silly. The rules increase people’s chances of winning, but even if they had a 100 percent chance of success, shouldn’t they be able to get over it

Ties Across the Sea

A partnership in legal education links Japan and the Law, esqxessing itself in the regular interchange of people and ideas, as shown by the articles chat lollo\+-

Making Sense of Japan\u27s Sokaiya Rackteers

How do legal, regulatory, and organizational systems affect the emergence and development of corporate extortion? The question arises whether the extortionist is a potential plaintiff seeking settlement, a labor uniion threatening to strike, or the lucky finder of the mouse-in-the-soda-bottle of urban legend. In each case, including those in which extortion may be lawful and even desirable, the extortionist\u27s threat and the corporation\u27s response depend on the institutional context in which the extortion take place. In the Japanese system, corporate extortion by sokaiya (literally, general meeting operators ) take several forms, a sokaiya typically is defined as a nominal shareholder who either attempts to extort money from a company to suppress opposition at the meeting. Surprisingly, Japanese executives pay sokaiya despite the fact that payment can result in civil and criminal liability not only for sokaiya, but for the executive as well. The following article is excerpted from Information, Institutions, and Extortion in Japan and the United States: Making Sense of Sokaiya Racketeers, which will appear in its complete form in 93 Northwestern University Law Review this summer. Publication is by permission

Haley and the Blowfish

In this Article, I want to explore these two insights of Haley’s in an off-the-beaten-path subject of regulation: blowfish. (That I am able to get so far off the beaten path is a luxury I owe to Haley, who, with a few others, created the path in the first place.) I ask two questions. First, why have blowfish poisoning rates fallen over time? Second, why do so few blowfish poisoning cases go to court

Exchange Rate Models Are Not as Bad as You Think

Standard models of exchange rates, based on macroeconomic variables such as prices, interest rates, output, etc., are thought by many researchers to have failed empirically. We present evidence to the contrary. First, we emphasize the point that "beating a random walk" in forecasting is too strong a criterion for accepting an exchange rate model. Typically models should have low forecasting power of this type. We then propose a number of alternative ways to evaluate models. We examine in-sample fit, but emphasize the importance of the monetary policy rule, and its effects on expectations, in determining exchange rates. Next we present evidence that exchange rates incorporate news about future macroeconomic fundamentals, as the models imply. We demonstrate that the models might well be able to account for observed exchange-rate volatility. We discuss studies that examine the response of exchange rates to announcements of economic data. Then we present estimates of exchange-rate models in which expected present values of fundamentals are calculated from survey forecasts. Finally, we show that out-of-sample forecasting power of models can be increased by focusing on panel estimation and long-horizon forecasts.

Law, Norms, and Legal Change: Global and Local in China and Japan

The editors of the Michigan Journal of International Law have boldly brought together four articles and commentary that focus on different aspects of the same problem in China and Japan: the relationship between domestic legal change and foreign and/or international law and regulation, soft agreements, norms, or even cultural practices. The compilation is bold in part because scholarship on change in East Asian law and legal systems often suffers from one of two defects. First, it often focuses on purely domestic phenomena in only one system, ignoring the comparative connections. Second, scholars often attack the problem from an exclusively comparative perspective, setting up two apparently different systems, one developed and the other backward or unsophisticated, with accompanying commentary on how they clash or how the latter conforms or measures up to the former