The author reveals in this paper his own view of ‘precedent’ research for legal interpretation. In the first place, ‘precedent’ is defined as judgement, both repeated in decisions and expressed anew in a decision by the Supreme Court before and after World War II. The ‘precedent’ so defined, which involves probable repetition of the same judgement, i. e. predictability, does not comprehend judgements by lower courts, which do not necessarily ensure predictability, due to their incompetence to bind the free judgement both by themselves and by the Supreme Court, in spite of its significance in legal sociology.
As to the question whether such ‘precedent’ is ‘law’ or not, the affirmative answer is given on the ground that ‘precedent’ binds practically lower courts, because their judgement against ‘precedent’ will surely be reversed by the Supreme Court, and that the Supreme Court itself needs to ‘open Grand Bench’ in order to reverse its own precedent.
Next comes the most complicated problem: Which part of a decision by the Supreme Court makes ‘precedent’, the holding as to reversal or dismissal, or the whole state ment of judgment including ratio decidendi, which expresses legal basis for the holding? Some of influencial Jurists stand by their opinion that ratio decidendi is a means to justify legally the holding, which came into the judge's mind intuitively separate from legal reasoning, and therefore that the holding, which enables people to predict future decisions in its connection with the particular facts of the case concerned, is the only factor of ‘precedent’. The author, however, stands in opposition to the said opinion, saying that the holding alone dose not form ‘precedent’ until it is understood as one part of the whole context, inseparably connected with the ratio decidendi. Firstly, it is unbelievable to say ratio decidendi is a mere means of justification. Secondly, the lower court deciding any remanded case might follow the ratio decidendi of the Supreme Court decision. And lastly, the process of generalizing the facts and holding in one particular decision and of relating both with each other, which is emphasized by the majority above mentioned, can not be successfully achieved without using the ratio decidendi. Significance of obiter dictum shown in the Supreme Court opinion, which lacks legal binaing competence unlike ratio decidendi, ought not to be neglected, because it may offer a clue for the prediction of future decisions with the high expectation of its adoption by the lower courts.
Finally, the purpose of ‘precedent’ research is not to be confined to the analysis of predictability of the decisions, but further to be extended to stimulating the court for better assurance of fair judgment by criticizing the court-room administration of justice. The ‘precedent’ research, in that sense, should be provided with the most important status in legal interpretation.

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The writer points out three difficulties particular in studying of constitutional cases; first, in fact finding, because it should not be confined to relevant alleged wrongful conducts but be extended to its social and historical background within the constitutional process; next, in the necessity for analysis into judge's ideological prejudice, which represents their own views of social and political life in our community and which plays key role in counter-balancing the intervention into human rights on prevailing political power; finally, in establishing solid principle of stare decisis declared by the Supreme Court due to the relatively small number of its precedents with their conceptual ambiguity.
As to the purpose of studying constitutional cases, scholars are required to make minute analysis into the judicial decision-making relating to the constitution in the whole context of constitutional process. The theory based upon such an analysis is expected to be useful for the scholars who are forced to take a definite attitude either for or against the decision, as their practical means to influence the future decisions in realizing their constitutional goals and ideas.

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The study of tax law, which occupied only a small part of the study of special administrative law before World War II in Japan, has never been developed as an independent branch of Jurisprudence or science of law, whereas the Report on Japanese Taxation by the Shoup Mission in 1949, which incurred an epoch-making reform of the taxation system in postwar Japan, recommended to found a chair for the study of tax law at the department of law in every university. It is surprising that a few officials at the Ministry of Finance, without sufficient aid of scientific knowledge, has been, in reality, able to enact legislation and issue administrative orders to bind the people in such an important method as taxation, which has deep and immediate influence upon the interests of every class of people. For this reason, the author suggests the necessity for rapid development of scientific study of tax law, pointing out: 1. The principle of ‘The Rule of Law’ has not successfully been realized in both substantive and procedural systems of tax law now in force. 2. Problems about substantive provisions of tax law, which have been treated solely from economic or financial point of view, should also be reconsidered from the legal point of view, to be reexamined in the light of the principles of the new Japanese Constitution, e. g. the principle of ‘equality of tax burden’. 3. Scientific observation, and analysis of taxation as a social phenomenon is needed in order to establish a reasonable tax law system by improving the present unreasonable deficiences. 4. The present tax law system seems not to occupy its right place in the whole legal system under the Constitution which declares respect for fundamental human rights as the supreme principle. 5. Studies of tax law should not be carried out simply by accummulating the results of other branches of Jurisprudence relating to tax law, but rather be furnished with a peculiar method enough to give a systematical perspective to the complicated voluminous provisions of tax law. 6. Studies of tax law should be independent of that of administrative law, which has laid too much emphasis upon the procedural aspects of taxation. The substantive provisions of tax law, which has been neglected in the administrative law researches in spite of its great volume and importance in the system, should be the major subject of the taxation studies for taxpayers. 7. Close relation of substantive tax law provisions with accounting would not exclude the necessity to establish a branch of the legal science to analyse their legal nature.

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This paper is the report on conditioning factors of Japanese students' sensibility to the Constitution based on the data collected from an attitude survey of the author's students at Saga University and Nagasaki Junior College of Shipbuilding. The results are: -
1. Even in the beginning of college life, that is, before their learning of the Constitution, the students show more or less sensibility to the Constitution though they are blunter than the average students in all over Japan especially in Tokyo. Causes of this fact are supposedly due mainly to mass communication, which may be fraudulent by the control of the ruling class, and other factors including family situation, school educatlon, particular characteristics of locality. The latter group of the factors includes feudalistic climate of local villages which has vital influences upon sensibility to the Tenno system, experience of poverty upon that to rights of existence residence in a strategic area of Kyushu, which lies near Korea and holds two U. S. millitary bases, upon that to unconstitutionality of their establishment in Japan, frequent disasters and financial difficulties in those areas upon that to the Self-defense Forces, which may give their service free to relieve disasters, and so on. 2. The learning of natural science as well as the Constitution and social sciences makes students more sensible to the Constitution. This shows that reasonable knowledge of scientific thinking is effective in improving the sensibility. 3. Student movement are another remarkable conditioning factor of the sensibility, judging from the fact that those, who have experienced anti-U. S.-Japan Security Treaty demonstration and participated in the counter action to the bill of the University Management Law, have sharper sensibility to constitutional human rights and renunciation of war. 4. Class interests have somthing to do with sensibility to the Constitution, since they are understood as influential factors on the fact that some of the students of Nagasaki Junior Colledge of Shipbuilding are more sensible to the Constitution even before the learning of the Constitution than others who have already got acquainted with the constitutional principles.
Thus the author concludes that reasonable knowledge of scientific thinking and the student movements against unconstitutional policy set forth by the goverment are the most influencial among factors conditioning sensibility to the Constitution and that converses are also true.

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Most of voluminous bibliographies relating to the family law issues and the marriage system in particular have failed, according to the author, to make fact analysis of statistical materials, with their deplorable tendency to discuss over literal interpretation of law, legal policy, unanalysed report of facts, or ideological doctrine. The author made two kinds of statistical survey of the date of marriage registration to meet such a failure.
Assumptions of these surveys are that this problem has some connections with that of unregistered marriage, the statistical survey of which is also few, and that the problem is considerably influenced by status quo of the family system.
The first survey was made with a view to ascertaining the interval between the date of birth of the first child of each couple and the date of their marriage registration. The complete sampling method has been taken of the children born in 1935-1958 of the first marriage couples, the registered heads of which have been domiciled at and resident in any of the most typical wards of residence, commerce and industry, commerce only, and industry only. (The materials regarding the last ward are not utilized here because they were lost by a typhoon.) The total samples of 10066 show the following results. 1. The cases were unexpectedly many, both before and after World War II, where the wife was registered into the husband's family register not soon after the marriage celebration but at the time of wife's pregnancy or child's birth, in other words, the marriage was transformed from de facto to de jure at that moment. 2. The cases, where the marriage registration was given within 14 days after the birth of the first child, amounted to a considerable number and were not rare in latest years. (The 14 days is the period, within which the notification of birth is legally required to be made.) 3. Only in recent years, the trend has been observable that the first children are born 9 or 10 months after the marriage registration of their parents.
The second survey had its aim to clarify the interval between the date of the wedding ceremony stated in the marriage registration form and the date of birth of the first child. 4409 samples selected among couples registered in the family register in any of the above-mentioned wards revealed the following results. 1. The number of the wedding ceremony reaches the peak in October throughout this period. This would have given the author good reason to claim that the wedding ceremony is controlled by one of customary rules. 2. The number of the cases, where the marriage registration is completed within a month after the date of the wedding ceremony, is greatest in every ward and period.
It is also concluded that these two kinds of statistical survey demonstrate the existence of some customary marriage rules in every ward, without any statistical significant difference.

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In the farm areas, especially the rice field areas in Tochigi Prefecture, there had been a custom called ‘fosterage’ among farmers for a long time. The farmers who employ the fostered children of school-age take care of them for the purpose of securing the agricultural labor power in the future. These children mostly come from the needy peasant families in the six prefectures in the northern part of Honshu Island and from within Tochigi Prefecture. They are usually sold with the apprenticeship, which lasts till the age of adulthood, either through the intermediation of the professional mediator called ‘Keian’ or through the direct bargaining between parents and employers. The survey on the slave trade cases during the period from Dec. 1948 to Apr. 1949, published by the Ministry of Labor, shows that 134 out of 282 total sufferers all over Japan were found in the farm areas in Tochigi Prefecture, being distributed at large to three areas, around the basins of the River Gogyo, the Rivers Kinu and Ta, and the Rivers Kuro and Sugata, and that most of these children were under 18 years of age.
According to the authors' investigation, around the basin of the River Gogyo, the farmer had, in general, a bigger cultivated acreage and not a few landlords owned 122 to 245 acres of rice fields before the Agrarian Reform soon after World War II. The housing, food, and clothing for fostered children were distinctively discriminated from those of farmers' own children. Farmers' own children would not work on farm; if they had to work on farm, they were the supervisors over fostered children. Around the basins of the Rivers Kinu, Ta, Kuro, and Sugata, in contrast, the farmer had a much smaller farmland and most of the farmers were owner farmers of 4.9 to 12.3 acres of rice fields before the Agrarian Reform. Being brought through parents-employers' direct bargaining, fostered children, most of whom were born within this prefecture, were treated just as the same as farmers' own children as indispensable labor power to the agricultural management of farmers and could become independent by marriage or by finding other occupation as the farmers' own second or third children could. Furthermore, some of them were legally adopted as soon as they were brought to farmers'. The registration filed of 1962 at Child Welfare Center, Tochigi Prefecture, which shows the existence of 8 foster parents around the basin of the River Gogyo and of 62 fostered children around the basins of other rivers, would prove such a custom of ‘fosterage’ still alive in those areas.
From the answers to the questionairs sent by the authors to all the foster parents in those areas and in Utsunomiy City, the prefectural metropolis, is drawn the conclusion that there can be made a division into three types of fosterage, that is, rural, intermediate, and urban types, by the differences of farm-land, scale of agricultural management, and familial type between the families, and that this prewar custom has been the transformed in favor of the fostered children especially around the basin of River Kinu.

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