Political Science Perspectives on Law

Abstract

This article examines how political science, especially judicial politics scholarship, perceives and approaches law and legal process. While judicial politics scholarship is underdeveloped in Japan, it is one of the main sub-fields of political science in the United States. It investigates the dynamics of behaviors and interactions of various actors and interactions between those actors and institutions in the judicial process. Whereas there are variety of approaches and methodologies in the judicial politics scholarship, they all share the premises that courts are policy-making political institutions and that the judicial process is that of power and politics. In that sense, the judicial politics scholarship parts from the legal scholarship which postulates the separation between political and judicial processes. This article analyzes how these approaches based on those premises respectively perceive law and legal process. In addition, it considers the significance of judicial politics researches for the advancement of legal researches.