In Japan, the Juris Doctor (JD)-style law-school system was introduced in 2004 as part of a judicial system reform. As of late, this system seems to have become dysfunctional. The pass rate of the national bar exam (NBE) is around 20% every year, and the NBE puts students are under considerable pressure. “Re”-renovation of legal education is, thereby, a huge and pressing issue. Reducing the number of JD students could be a quick solution to the current problems. However, this is not enough, nor is it good for fostering legal professionals “rich both in quality and quantity” (the second aim of the judicial reform). Legal education should go beyond the NBE. The Japanese government and law schools have just begun to re-renovate legal education, giving priority to three challenges: (1) offering continuous legal-education programmes for practitioners; (2) enhancing community service and supporting career development of graduates in the new legal service area; and (3) internationalization. How can the Japanese legal-education system go beyond the NBE? Re-renovation deserves continued attention.

The emphasis on practical training in legal education has come to the fore in many countries. It is little different in South Korea, where curricula for legal education now include a range of courses categorized as “practical training.” The author questions whether the subjects taught under the title “practical training” effectively prepare students for practice in the real world. Education in legal theory and practical training are connected, which makes the categorization of courses specifically aimed at practical training inappropriate. More emphasis should be given to instilling practice awareness throughout all of legal education. It is argued that, in order to develop professional skills, incorporating practice awareness throughout the entire legal education curricula is important—that is, not limiting such skills to practical training courses, but integrating them throughout the teaching of legal theory.

This article argues that two types of pressure, specifically pressure from international competition and pressure resulting from the low employment rate of law graduates, are the major motivations for the new wave of legal education reforms in China. The direction of the reforms is from a single model into more diversified models. However, there is tension between “the universities’ pursuit of academic freedom and featured education” and “the government’s focal investment associated with deliberation and calculation.” In recent years, Chinese legal education reform has placed more and more emphasis on practical skills training, and Chinese law schools are now required to open legal practice courses that must make up no less than 15% of the curricula. The author thinks this developmental trend is correct, but points to a potential problem: the costs of practical skills training, historically borne by mostly courts, procuratorates, and law firms, are now being transferred to law schools. Therefore, reform of the legal education sector in China should be adopted together with reforms in the tuition and fees system, as well as the bar exam, so that planned changes can be applied outside of the academic sector.

Taiwanese legal education is undergoing transformation and diversification. While the traditional approach to legal education has produced legal professionals who have led civil rights movements and contributed to the democratization of Taiwan, it has failed to meet the challenges of today’s world. Under globalization, Taiwanese industries and society now require lawyers capable of solving transnational legal disputes and legal issues regarding developments in technology and changes in society. However, these new challenges also provide law schools in Taiwan with an opportunity to apply experimental approaches, to innovate legal education. This essay describes the past and present state of legal education in Taiwan, especially its development since the government’s failed attempt at reform. Furthermore, it introduces the successful example of National Chiao Tung University’s Law School—a new law school that has developed a creative model of “innovation hub” and “social enterprise” that is transforming Taiwan’s legal education.

Law schools in East Asia and the US share at least two central challenges. The first relates to globalization and the responsibility of law schools to prepare students to practise in a global environment. The second relates to the contest for control over lawyer licensing that law schools engage in with bar authorities, among others. Is either challenge appropriate for solution through a collaborative approach among law schools from different countries and regions? Research on collaboration identifies the need for a common, shared purpose among collaborators. Local differences make collaboration unlikely with regard to the contest for control, but the goal of developing an approach to prepare students for work in a global environment rises above national differences and is ripe for collaboration.

Globalization is rapidly changing the landscape of law practice in China, especially its corporate legal sector. This article reports on the preliminary findings of the China research of the Globalization, Lawyers, and Emerging Economies (GLEE) Project—a comparative study that examines how globalization is reshaping the market for legal services in important emerging economies and how these developments are contributing to the transformation of the political economy in these countries and beyond. Adopting an ecological approach, which examines how different segments of the legal system interact with one another in complex ways, this article maps the corporate core, international linkages, and domestic contexts of China’s globalizing corporate legal sector and discusses its impact on lawyers and society.

The judicialization of politics in Taiwan is particularly evident in three domains: the expansion of judicial power, a shift in political equilibrium, and litigation for social change. Yet it is not altogether clear why politicians and social groups are willing to transfer decision-making powers from the political branches to the judiciary, particularly the Constitutional Court. This paper endeavours to fill this academic lacuna by suggesting that the judicialization of politics occurs in Taiwan because both politicians and citizens choose the judiciary as another agent to implement their preferred policies. Nevertheless, Taiwan does not become a juristocracy and, indeed, the pace of the judicialization has slowed down since the second party turnover. The development of the judicialization of politics in Taiwan may shed new light on many old topics, such as judicial supremacy and the relationship between judicial power and political uncertainty.

Since May 2009, public participation in the criminal justice system, known as saiban-in seido (trial system by lay judges), has been implemented in Japan. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the law-making process of the saiban-in system and present an evaluation of the system from the perspective of deliberative democracy. This paper concludes that, contrary to criticism from those who want to introduce a purer form of jury trial dominated by lay jurors, the current saiban-in system, which mixes three professional judges with six saiban-ins, should be viewed positively from the perspective of deliberative democracy.

Though often viewed as a mere stepping stone in Japan’s gradual early-twentieth-century military and economic encroachment on China, the “puppet state” of Manchukuo was also paradoxically characterized by a high degree of legitimizing legal rhetoric. While its political realities generally failed to reflect these idealized foundations, the latter did provide significant space for legal and other forms of civil society resistance, including by Chinese legal professionals. The germinal resistance movement of these actors demonstrates a complex relationship between the concepts of sovereignty, law, and national affiliation, both in the context of state repression and in the overlapping demands of competing identities. Though various theoretical understandings of resistance help to illuminate this activism, it is perhaps best seen as a radical challenge to the regime’s power to define the norms and exceptions of political and social life.

The literature on Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has argued for the general advantages of courts’ providing mediation services. However, courts’ involvement in mediation cannot always be justified by those advantages, unless (1) the mediation process is a consensual procedure based on party autonomy and (2) where the initiation is mandatory, the courts’ allocation of cases is justified both by the public interest and a case selection system. In this context, this article empirically tests whether the established arguments from ADR theory can be applied to justify all Chinese court-annexed mediation practices. This study provides a negative answer, owing to the fact that some Chinese court-annexed mediation practices found in the fieldwork aim mainly at clearing dockets and achieving case management for the courts’ organizational interests. Offsetting the advantages, those Chinese court-annexed mediation practices prevent disputants from gaining access to the official adjudication procedure.

Through an empirical study of the state-sponsored community mediation programme in Sri Lanka known as Mediation Boards (MBs), this paper examines this local-level mediation as a hybrid practice. Established as an Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanism, the MBs were initiated as a more effective and efficient alternative to the formal courts for local and minor disputes. In the case-study conducted on an MB, it was found that there is extensive replication of formal legal procedures alongside the mediators’ own cultural interpretations of disputes. By locating this hybrid practice theoretically within the framework of legal pluralism and its broad definition of law, an attempt is made to expand the scope of the pluralistic nature of law not only to include alternative forms of law, but also to understand the dynamic interactions between multiple normative orderings.