Abstract
The following are my comments on the presentations in our symposium on legal education. 1) Teaching law has been an effective route for Westernization in Japan. One of the marked features that graduates from a Law Department tend to acquire is their readiness to be accountable for social order. Compared with graduates from Literature or Economics, bachelors of law are likely to better manage norms in general. I believe recent sea change in legal education in Japan, which includes new establishment of about 70 law schools, will not affect the basic advantage of law education at undergraduate level. 2) When social norms are under perpetuated change lawyers are required to be more creative than regular study of law interpretation facilitates them to be. In such a circumstance Legal Philosophy, together with Sociology and Comparative Study of Law etc., will become all the more important. The fact that first rank law schools in the U. S. have rich courses in those theoretical studies of law is revealing this. 3) Professor Hagiwara talked about Japanese pseudo-rule of law. In that context too much focus on the Alternative Dispute Resolution and Restorative Justice might be harmful. In ADR, legal rules which are relevant to the concerned legal case will not be identified and confirmed. Otherwise, the rules found applicable to a new case today are likely to be applied to the similar cases in the future so that the number of cases which will come to the court for just resolution will be reduced greatly. In ADR, there is no guarantee that similar cases will be resolved similarly, which is one of requisites for the appearance of justice or that of rule of law. 4) The most fundamental thesis in my observation is that in the ideological phenomenon like law social belief in its existence which has something to do with people's sense of justice tends to make people behave accordingly so that the social reality in which we can talk on law meaningfully will come in place. In short the belief in law tends to fulfill itself. So, the main task of legal profession has been and still is to disseminate this belief.
