In the Judicial Reform now in process in Japan, the new law school system models itself mainly on that of the United States. American law schools, based on accreditation by A. B. A. and A. A. L. S., have three characteristics in their curricula: stress on the first year courses of required subjects, providing various opportunities of practical or clinical education, and teaching a variety of basic and/or interdisciplinary studies of law. Jurisprudence or legal philosophy is among the last category.
This paper, focusing on Jurisprudence, expounds the history of American legal education, its background ideas, and the major questions in the philosophical inquiry.
It argues that despite a long history of apprenticeship the legal education made a drastic turn in the middle of the twentieth century into making much of the theoretical side of instruction partly because of the diversity of law and legal practice in America; that the fundamental idea in law is a limited sense of pragmatism which has been widely shared by various American legal theorists from Christopher Langdell to Ronald Dworkin and which underlies the idea of “Respon-sive Law” driving legal developments; and that theoretical inquiries that embody the idea of responsive law converge on the issues of legal justification as well as legal process in jurispru-dence, with considerations that we may call the “legal system balance” and the “legal principle balance”, which mold, as a result, particular features of the rule of law.
Fostered through American legal education, the idea of responsive law is a vigorous source of legal practice in contemporary societies.
