The assumption that the fundamental purpose of socio-legal studies is observing the ‘law’ leads us to three interrelated questions. These questions are the following. What is the ‘law’ to be observed? What perspective should we adopt to observe the ‘law’? What does it mean to observe the ‘law’ as a socio-legal endeavor? There is no unique right answer to each of these questions, and the answer one reaches largely depends upon a particular ‘theory,’ ‘perspective’ and ‘method’ he or she adopts for observing the ‘law.’ It does not mean, however, that meaningful academic dialogue is impossible among those socio-legal scholars who adopt different ‘theories’ or ‘methods’ from one another. Rather, our understanding of the ‘law’ will become richer through the sincere academic dialogue among those who adopt different ‘theories,’ ‘perspectives’ or ‘methods’ from one another.

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This article is based on the data of conversation of a case in an uncertificated private mediation organization.Uncertificated private mediation organizations are also regulated by a part of Act on Promotion of Use of ADR in Japan. A lot of these organizations serve facilitative model mediation. Then this model is so useful for them to acquire transparency and legitimacy. The parties are shaped as the subjects who communicate in facilitative mediation style, according to the mediator’s skillful practice in the mediation process. But a facilitative mediation does not really proceed toward the agreement evolutionally like the model. Some parties go back to their past events at the stage of brainstorming. These parties resist the power of domination to confine them to the model’s conversation style. At the same time, the most important matter for them is emerging.

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The purpose of this paper is to examine the general form of how each judgment is decided and observed, both from inside and outside the legal system. “Judging” is to observe society using a legal framework, and therefore case-studies (to observe and analyze actual judgments) involves “observation of observation” in which there are complex networks that consist of multiple social observations. From the viewpoint of a general legal norm and its interpretation — which is where this study starts from — a judgment is an interpretation of legal norms, the alien in the legal system, a window through which the legal system observes the whole society, the clue to start social communication with other social systems, and the trace of observation by individuals.

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This paper is to pursue what ‘law’ can be viewed through academic researches concerning family. ‘Family’ is regarded as a minimum and fundamental unit of society which is comprehensive so that family can be seen in any kind of society. However, the term ‘family’ has multiple meanings and its concept can be defined diversely depending on contexts as well as factors such as societal changes. There are a number of researches relating to family conducted in various areas and fields of studies such as law, sociology, history, anthropology, psychology and so on which also illustrates the universality of ‘family.’ In this paper it divides ‘family’ into two types according to its ‘law’, namely A type of family which can be regulated by the state laws including statutes and B type of family which can be regulated by living law and some sort of rules and norms other than the state laws. While A type family is visible in the eyes of the state laws because they are categorised as a ‘legitimate family,’ B type family is invisible as it can be a non-legal but de facto ‘family’ in that respect. Viewing ‘family’ and its ‘law’ by contrasting A type family and the B type family, it has become evident that a boundary between A type family and B type family has always been redrawn. This is because that some of B type family groups shall be ‘upgraded’ its status to A type family as a result of equalisation or conforming gaps among principles, statutes and realities of family systems. For example, a married heterosexual couple used to be the only legitimate unit which was legally recognised in A type but later it included a cohabiting heterosexual couple. It was a landmark case of the former Supreme Court in 1915 which had opened a way to provide remedies with aggrieved ‘common-law-wives’ by taking into account the fact that there were a number of such ‘wives’ abandoned by their husbands’ family without/before notifying marriage. A cohabiting common-law couple, who was once categorised as B type family without legal recognition, is now regarded as a quasi/de facto wife and husband that they have been ‘upgraded’ their status as next to a married couple and shifted in A type family accordingly.

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This paper points out that criminal punishments serve to maintain order by establishing social boundaries. For this purpose, this paper focuses on administrations of the criminal law, and analyzes the behavior of Japanese prosecutors referring mainly to discussions of Emile Durkheim and Kai T. Erikson.

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Max Weber regards modern «legal» order as not only an “iron cage,” but also as flexible and dynamic. In his opinion, the «legal» order is established by all members who can expect one another’s behavior “as if” they observed it, and the law “evaders” are familiar with the meanings of the order based on such “consent.” In short, they act systematically against the consent. What position do they hold then in the «legal» order? For example, Werner Sombart says that Jewish merchants took advantage of the legal form of bearer securities which make “reification” of credit relationships to protect their fortune from the storm of the Inquisition. Like these Jewish people who Sombart describes, can “strangers” who have been persecuted in the «legal» order hide themselves and play an essential part in changing it? Weber’s response is extremely cautious. In his view, the law “evaders” are subsumed under the «legal» order in so far as they obey it while disobeying. This contrast between Weber and Sombart still begs the important question: how do we grasp the relationships between structure and subject along the boundaries of the «legal» order?

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This paper exposes three weaknesses of the social systems theory, proposed by Niklas Luhmann, in describing our civil society. These weaknesses are: (a) the relationship between institutionalization and fiction, (b) the application of the autopoietic theory in biology to his social systems theory, and (c) the disregarding of physical body and irrationality. First, Luhmann calls the generalization of expectations of human actions in the social dimension “institutionalization.” Although he recognizes the relationship between institutionalization and fiction, he merely analyzes the process of institutionalization from the point of social interaction, and not from the point of mental construction of fiction; therefore, he cannot properly describe the relationship between institutionalization and the protest against institution. Second, Luhmann applies the autopoietic theory proposed by Maturana and Varela to his social systems theory. However, in the process the theory becomes static and unvital, while our civil society is very dynamic and varies widely. We should pay attention to Maturana’s original model, which focuses on the dynamic process of living systems. Third, Luhmann defines communication as the synthesis of three choices, information, utterance, and understanding. Additionally, he argues that a social system is composed of communication, not of physical bodies or social actors. Therefore, according to his theory, incomprehensible utterances or physical activities are not regarded as communication, unless they are understood by society. However, in our daily life, we sometimes talk to those who suffer from mental illnesses or are faced with their death. Lingis views communication not only from the perspective of understanding of information, but also from that of actions or practices. Therefore, we should stretch Luhmann’s concept of communication to cover various ways of communication in our everyday life.

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In submitting his viewpoint of what is referred to as his discourse on power, Michel Foucault at one point expulsed law （“Expulsion of Law” Thesis） to unfold his original discourse using a method that did not place law as the starting or base point. On the other hand, Foucault also tried to place law back into his discourse on power. In the first half of this Paper, I will reperceive this relationship between power and law from the standpoint of power which is made to be as it is and power that is left to perish. In the second half, I will arrange and sort the concepts Foucault worked with in his latter stage such as governmentality （gouvernementalité）, conduct（conduit）/ counter- conduct（contre-conduit） and self-concern（souci de soi）, and attempt to project their group arrangement relationship upon the process of civil dispute resolution. Thereafter, I will like to guide the Paper to the horizon that calls into question “parrêsia” with regard to law.

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Roberto Unger who has proposed and explored the institutionalist approach of Critical Legal Studies understands（a） law as “the institutional form of the life of a people” that embraces the internal dialectic of its own destabilization as well as the mechanisms of stabilization; and（b） legal thought as institutional imagination that is capable of seizing upon and developing the dialectic of destabilization in the service of reconstruction of the basic legal-institutional arrangements of society. Since the middle of the twentieth century, however, a variety of rationalizing and necessitarian tendencies of legal and social thought have stood out. They have worked as blinkers that prevent legal analysts from grasping the transformative opportunities in law expressed as institutional indeterminacy or legal pluralism in each domain of social life, and as result, have discouraged the full development of their legal-institutional imagination. Thus, Roberto Unger’s institutionalist critical legal studies has assumed the following intellectual tasks:（1） kenosis -- clearing out those misdirected, rationalizing or necessitarian theories of law and society;（2） mapping -- describing the complex institutional microstructures of society filled with the variations and contradictions; and （3） criticism -- developing the ideas of alternative institutional arrangements made from those variations and contradictions. Hence, Roberto Unger’s intellectual project on law is best understood as the reinstatement of legal analysis as social theory of the structure with the spirit of transformative vocation. It pushes one step further the progressive program of Law and Society Movement, holding a motto that the progressive’s task is not only to perceive in law and legal thought the characteristic reflection of the existing social structures but also to grasp in them the promising embryos of alternative social visions for the better future.

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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.

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The purpose of this article is to review how economic approaches have characterized law and to draw some implications for the study of law and society. This article concerns with, among many other schools of economics, so-called “neoclassical economics” and game theory. The strength of economic approaches to law lies in the fact that they enable us to describe the influence of law on people’s behavior and the society in an unambiguous way. We can describe it through abstraction and simplification of reality, usually specifying assumptions about human decision-making. This kind of approach is particularly useful for exploring causal mechanisms that works in legal phenomena (such as legal norms and legal actions), and is therefore also useful for conducting research in the area of law and society. While law is characterized as something given or exogenous in most traditional economic models, new lines of research have recently been initiated: experimental studies on the effect of legal rules on individuals’ decision-making processes or outcomes; theoretical and empirical studies addressing how what we call “law” emerges and sustains itself. This article focuses on the latter studies, and points out that the series of studies will open up the possibility of further interdisciplinary cooperation.

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This paper aimed to answer following three questions: （1）what are the psychological methods in studying law,（2）the characteristics of the psychological methodology in studying law, and（3）what would be the idea of law when researchers study law with psychological methodologies. （1） the psychological methodology in studying law is the same as a modern scientific method of psychology, that is a method of systematic observation which was modeled after the methods used in natural sciences. The method of observation contains survey and experiment. The fundamental conception which sustain the observation methods is positivism in which is used widely in the scientific arena. （2） The characteristics of the psychological methodology in studying law is that the methodology presumes how the humans behave actually or how they recognize actually in their social circumstances in which they live. The methodology allows us to understand the legal phenomena which emerge as interactions among humans. （3） From the viewpoint of modern psychology, law can be understood as a special form of the norm. That is, psychology defines norm as “common behavioral formats in a certain group.” Law is very special norm which is thought that is right according to a certain value judgment, which is recognized as that should be widely applied to our society. And in some cases, law is verbalized and approved by an official procedure. In reality, the boarder between law and non-law norm should be always wavering, and what is law should be vacillating as well.

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Ethnomethodology/Conversation analysis is recognized as a “radical” perspective or methodology in the sociology of law in general. This radicality can be understood as being composed mainly of the following two points when it is compared with behaviorism, voluntarism, symbolic interaction theory, and discourse analysis; (1) The research subject of the ethnomethodology／conversation analysis is not the «law» as the independent variable /dependent variable but the «legal action» itself and (2) the researchers who obey Ethnomethodology/Conversation analysis observe «legal action» from the inherent viewpoint of the parties without giving hyper-explanation of it from the standpoint of the observer. What is produced through this methodology is a description of «law» as a contingent and ongoing “methodic achievement” of the parties (social members). This description of «law» includes features such as self-reference and the removal of the distinction between substance and form of legal communication. These features must be understood as implying the following assertions. Firstly, the substantive definition of «law» should be described insofar as the parties engage in acts of defining what the law is. Secondly, the perspective which views the interpretation or definition of the «law» at a particular time as the entity of the law is inappropriate in socio-legal studies.

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Talcott Parsons’s general theory is so useful to connect various studies in social sciences. Therefore, using Parsons’s great theory, we can find the convergence between Mary Douglas’s Symbolic Anthropology and Clifford Geertz’s Interpretive Anthropology. Such finding tells us that law consists of categories rather than morality. Categories are often regarded as the sacred because they are essential to human thinking and ordering, and hence the protection of categories tends to be more important than punishment and relief. This characteristic of law is common in highly differentiated societies as well as undifferentiated or primitive societies, which have been the main subjects of anthropological research.

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This Paper explores whether or not the Japanese Bar does maintain the integrity as a system. This is one of the pivotal questions for lawyer profession since the integrity constitutes the essential foundation of the self-regulation enjoyed by them. The data set utilized for the analysis is the record of discipline reinforced by the Bar between 1995 and 2014. While previous studies paying attention to the practice of disciplinary system of the Japanese Bar have examined the issue based mainly on the secondary sources summed up by the Bar itself, this paper tries to utilize the data computed by the author himself. The major findings of the investigation can be summarized as follows: (i) the range of career cohort of lawyers disciplined have gradually widened for these 20 years; (ii) cases appealed for the higher instances of the disciplinary machinery has dramatically increased within the period surveyed, and (iii) such appeal cases have become filed by the less-experienced lawyers compared to ten years ago. System-theoretic perspective allows us to interpret this situation as system disintegration, a weakening of the integrity among the Japanese Bar.

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This paper takes up postwar judicial dockets in Japan and focuses on litigation rates (cases per 100,000 capita) of civil trial cases at district courts and summary courts for the last fifty years. These rates are divided into two categories; i.e. those of cases carried out without attorney representations (“in-person case rates”) and those with their representation on an either side or on both (“representation case rates”), and are calculated respectively at the prefectural level. Both categories show peculiar and significant regional differences and the determining social background factors are sought for analytically, statistically and theoretically. A main determinant for the regional differences of “representation case rates” is likely to be the number of attorneys in the area, but that of “in-person case rates” seems to be more complicated. Especially perplexing is traditional and long-lasting relatively high “in-person case rates” in the western part of Japan centering around Kyushu area, irrespective of the level of urbanization. This paper tries to explain this complexity by pointing out and combining three social determining factors (“level of modernization,” “economic prosperity” and “two traditional cultures”). The high rates in urban areas (e.g. Tokyo and Osaka) and a recent settled land (Hokkaido) are mainly determined by the first factor. The relatively low rates in mainly central part of Japan are, at the same time, considered generally wealthy areas in Japan, hence the strong influence of the second economic factor. The traditional culture in the western Japan may have been and be less rejective to modern judiciary than that of the eastern part. This pluralistic perspective is original and creative, while it is based on the past socio-legal academic tradition and knowledge in Japan.

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Although lots of questions and answers related to law reciprocated in Q & A sites such as Yahoo! Answers, it is not obvious how people consult their troubles or law related problems in the Web, and what kind of functions Q & A sites have in people’s daily life. Therefore, to examine the function of Q & A sites for law, in this research with 928 law-related-questions in Yahoo! Answers, we conducted four analyses; categorization on trouble type (Analysis 1), abductive inference on patterns of questions (Analysis 2), categorization on “Best answer” to questions (Analysis 3), and abductive inference on patterns of comments from questioner (Analysis 4). Results showed that the Q & A sites had the following functions: substitute for legal experts, venue for asking delicate questions (small, ashamed, or fearful), means for distinguishing legal from illegal matters, tool for checking the responses after claiming his/her own opinion and platform to gather thoughts and information from lots of people or the people who experienced similar problems. These results indicated that the functions of Q & A sites were different from ones of consulting legal professions or other advice seeking behavior.

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