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The Organization of Prosecution and the Possibility of Order

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

David T. Johnson
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Abstract

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In prosecution, as in armies, prisons, and schools, organization matters. Japanese prosecutors work in an organization that differs markedly from the organizations in which their American counterparts work. This fact has important implications for how prosecutors in Japan define and perform their central tasks and thus for the quality of Japanese criminal justice. Most critically, the Japanese way of organizing prosecution enables prosecutors to effectively manage the tension between two imperatives of justice that American regard as often incompatible and always in tension: the need to individualize case dispositions and the need to treat like cases alike so as to achieve “order.” As mirror and model, Japan can teach the United States how to improve the level of order in its own systems of criminal justice.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , 1998 , pp. 247 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by the Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I would like to thank Araki Jiro, David Bayley, Malcolm Feeley, Daniel Foote, John Haley, Chalmers Johnson, Richard Leo, Sheldon Messinger, Setsuo Miyazawa, David Nelken, Greg Noble, Mark Ramseyer, Jerome Skolnick, Yamashita Yukio, Frank Zimring, numerous Japanese prosecutors, and three anonymous reviewers for their help with this project. For their generous financial assistance I thank the Fulbright Foundation, the Earl Warren Legal Institute, and the Sho Sato U.S.-Japan Legal Studies Program of Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, and the Program on U.S.-Japan Relations at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs.

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