The aim of this symposium is to draw the attention of Japanese legal historians to the notion of the Mixed Legal System and suggest that the Japanese Law should be investigated from the point of view of the mixed legal system. Invited scholars are from Scotland and South Africa. It is important to compare Japan with those countries of mixed legal system with a view to what kind of mixture constitutes Japanese law. Scotland and South Africa have mixed systems of Continental Civil law (Roman law) and English Common law, which give us historical perspectives of the interaction between these two laws. In particular, the way of handling legal ideas and terms of the two different systems can also help in decribing Japanese legal history in English, with the notions of Common law.
The chosen topic at this symposium is ‘customary’ law because Japanese law has been taken as a mixture of Civil law and customary law. Professor John Cairns (Edinburgh) discusses “Custom and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Scotland”. He looks into the theory and practice facing the issue of slavery in the 18th century, with referrence to some important cases reaching Knight v. Wedderburn in 1778. Professor Thomas Bennett (Cape Town) gives a paper entitled “Loan words and legal transplants : two frameworks for the analysis of ubuntu in South African law”. He introduces to us a fundamental idea of African origin, ubuntu, which is working in the mixed system of South Africa. Professor Kenichi Moriya and Professor Kozo Ogawa give comments on each paper respectively which have developed further discussion on relationships between custom and law.
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