Japan is a civil law country, and the precedent of the Supreme Court is not binding on either the Supreme Court itself or lower courts. Judges are supposed to return to the text of the statute for each legal dispute and apply the rules to specific cases. Judicial decisions are not “law” to be applied [...]
The Supreme Court of Japan (SCJ), and the Japanese judiciary as a whole, possess a number of institutional and behavioral characteristics that render them worthy of attention for those who study law and courts, judicial politics, or comparative constitutional law. To name but a few, these characteristics include the extensive degree of bureaucratic control that [...]
The Constitution of Japan, enacted on November 3, 1946, and effective as of May 3, 1947, gave the judicial power to the Supreme Court and the inferior courts established by the Diet, the national legislature, and gave the power of judicial review to the judiciary.
Equipped with the power of judicial review, the Japanese Supreme [...]
Judicial review in Japan can be characterized as a failure in more than one sense. On the one hand, the Saikō saibansho, or Supreme Court of Japan (SCJ), strikes down government actions so rarely that the judicial enforcement of constitutional limits on government power exists more in theory than in practice. On the other hand, [...]
Judicial decision making in Japan has become a topic of considerable interest for at least the cadre of comparative lawyers whose primary concern is constitutional law. Such interest is to be applauded. Comparisons with Japan are always beneficial, in that they require a departure from the prevailing focus on the United States and Western Europe. [...]
As we consider the political and social roles of the Japanese Supreme Court and specifically whether it has a conservative influence, we need not only to define “conservative” but also to think of what roles a court may play in a democratic society. One role that has received a lot of attention in this symposium [...]
