明治憲法体制成立期における司法官任用制度の形成

抄録

After 1880s the Meiji Government began striving to establish its bureaucratic machinery corresponding to the new Diet system to be set up; and consequently, the Imperial University as a prime educator of future high level civil servants was founded in addition to a recruitment system. This paper attempts to clarify how that recruitment system, in particular how judicial officers and administrative officers were recruited, was instituted during the 1880s and 1890s. Special attention is paid to government grants provided by the Ministry of Law to several private law schools and also to students studying under the Faculty of Law at the Imperial University. Through an analysis of the character of these government grants and the intentions of the Ministry of Law in granting them, the author traces the development process involving the judicial recruitment system. It can be said that the system was firmly established in 1891 with the determination of "Regulations Concerning Judicial and Procuratorial Appointment Examinations". During the preceding three years, the higher civil service examinations for judicial officer candidates, which began in 1888, were conducted rigorously by the Examinations Board; and in those examinations the abovementioned two types of government grants proved to play an important part in securing a certain amount of promising judicial officers. However, as the importance of teaching law in foreign languages declined as the result of the enactment of a series of new laws, private law schools where legal education was given in Japanese began to rise in importance. Concurrently, the government grants paid to private law schools to enable law education in foreign languages came to lose its meaning. Scholarships paid to judicial trainees were also reduced, and access to the government grants for law students was suspended in anticipation of a newly established recruiting system of judicial officers. Thereafter, promising graduates of the Imperial University's Faculty of Law began to aspire to administrative posts rather than judicial. Thus, a kind of dual recruiting structure appeared in the high level civil service, in which many administrative officers were recruited from the Imperial University, while more than half of judicial officers were recruited from private law schools.