Legal Education and the Profession in Australia, Japan, and Beyond

Following on from my previous report on Mr Akira Kawamura’s talk in Sydney about the significant transformations impacting on the legal profession in Japan, East Asia and world-wide, let us briefly consider also some inter-related changes to legal education in our region. ANJeL Judges-in-Residence Program Convenor Stacey Steele is co-editing, with Kathryn Taylor, “Legal Education in East Asia: Globalisation, Change and Contexts” (forthcoming in December from Routledge: ISBN 978-0-415-49433-5) to commemorate the late Professor Mal Smith, who did so much for ANJeL, Australia-Japan relations, and legal education particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. ANJeL Co-director Kent Anderson and Competitions Program Convenor Trevor Ryan have contributed a very useful chapter on “Gatekeepers: A Comparative Critique of Admission to the Legal Profession and Japan’s New Law Schools”, which they and Stacey have kindly shared with me in manuscript form.
Hopefully without stealing too much of their thunder, I would like to extend it to locate especially Australian legal education. Below are my opening remarks for a co-authored National Report on Topic I.D “The Role of Practice in Legal Education” for the 18th International Congress of Comparative Law, held four-yearly in different venues – this time from 25 July 2010 in Washington DC. Through the Sydney Centre for International Law, Professor Cheryl Saunders, Justice James Douglas and I have arranged for many other National Reporters on diverse topics selected for the Congress. We can also expect there many National Reports from Japan, although it remains to be seen whether anyone has volunteered one for the same Legal Education topic. There remains considerable uncertainty about Japan’s new postgraduate “Law School” programs and their relationship to the National Legal Examination system, as I explained in a paper first presented a conference organised by Stacey in Melbourne where the “gatekeeper” framework was first unveiled.

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Kawamura Connections: Tokyo Lawyers Go Global, All the Way With the IBA

Mr Akira Kawamura is senior partner in Anderson Mori & Tomotsune (AMT), one of Tokyo’s “big four” firms – each of which now has around 400-500 lawyers, compared to around 50 just a decade ago. He is also Vice-President of the International Bar Association (IBA), a federation of law societies from 136 countries comprising over 20,000 members world-wide. Kawamura-sensei is also one of Sydney Law School’s distinguished alumni, obtaining an LLM here in 1979, and he is a founding Advisor to the Australian Network for Japanese Law (ANJeL) as well as a generous donor for the ANJeL Akira Kawamura course prizes in Japanese Law. On 21 September he visited the new Law School building and spoke with staff and students about global legal practice, developments in Japan, and the work of the IBA.
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Japan’s New Quasi-Jury System and Video-Taping of Interrogations

Japan has reintroduced a system involving lay participation in serious criminal trials. As discussed in several Australian Network for Japanese Law (ANJeL) events over recent years, this saiban’in system involves randomly selected ‘Lay Judges’ and professional career judges jointly assessing the facts to reach a verdict, as well as deciding on sentences. The model is more Continental European than Anglo-American, but a shared concern is to bring the justice system closer to citizens’ everyday life – a guiding principle in the Judicial Reform Council’s Final Recommendations issued in 2001. Diverse dimensions to greater popular participation throughout Japan’s legal process, including also my study of how the Japanese government organizes its litigation services beyond the criminal justice sphere, will be the subject of ANJeL’s third book from Edward Elgar (forthcoming around December 2010, co-edited with Leon Wolff and Kent Anderson).
Legislation establishing this saiban’in system was enacted in 2004, but implementation was delayed for five years to allow all stakeholders to get used to the idea and many practical implications. (For example, many of the ANJeL Judges-in-Residence sent to Australia by the Supreme Court of Japan have carefully compared how this country manages jury trials, especially in connection with the media.) The enactment illustrates my previous point that the former Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) led coalition had already shifted away from more conservative stances even before its dramatic loss of power in the general election on 30 August this year. Even more ironically, although the first saiban’in trial took place without apparent mishap earlier that month, campaigns by the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) and other then-Opposition parties drew on growing concerns among the general public about actually having to serve as Lay Judges. Hopefully, however, Japan’s experience will become similar to Australia’s – where the general public is quite negative about serving on juries, but individual jurors afterwards report that it was a worthwhile experience. (A similar pattern is also observed in the US.)

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Lessons for Australia – How (Japan and) other countries are dealing with current consumer issues

Tezukayama University Professor Michelle Tan (who Commented recently on my previous blog on the new DPJ government and law reform) spoke with me on this topic at the big SOCAP (Society of Consumer Affairs Professionals) conference in Sydney over 25-6 August. Key conference themes were the impact of the GFC and world-wide recession, and the new nation-wide Australian Consumer Law reforms. We emphasised the need for Australia to unify consumer nation-wide by ‘trading up’ not only to best practice from among its states and territories, but also to emerging global standards. Our presentation compared developments in consumer policy/administration generally, product liability and safety, consumer credit and unfair contract terms, collective redress and consumer ADR. (Powerpoints and a related Working Paper are here, drawing on my various Submissions to aspects of Australia’s current consumer law reform program.)

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The New DPJ Government in Japan: Implications for Law Reform

Mainstream Australian media provided distressingly meager coverage of Japan’s exciting general election for the more powerful lower House of Representatives last Sunday, which saw a remarkable about-face. The centrist Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) went from 115 to 308 seats, with allies SDP (the small leftover of the once-powerful Social Democratic Party) and the New Party Nippon taking another 7 and 3 seats respectively. Overall, these and other former Opposition parties took 340 seats, whereas the conservative ruling coalition suffered a massive defeat. The Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) dropped to 119 seats, from 300 before the election (and 296 in 2005, the previous election called by Junichiro Kozumi who then retired as Prime Minister). The Komeito dropped from 31 to 21 seats, meaning that the former ruling coalition now only has 140 seats. In short, the tables have turned almost completely since 2005, in a country (in)famous for its aversion to abrupt changes in direction.
This blog posting is the first of several thinking through this result and some implications for policy and law reform in Japan.

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Law, Public Policy and Economics in Japan and Australia: Reviewing Bilateral Relations and Commercial Regulation in 2009

This is the grand title of a modest Sydney Law School Research Paper (No 09/71) updating and editing another collection of my blog postings both here and on the East Asia Forum. Freely downloadable via http://ssrn.com/abstract=1446523, it is based mainly on developments from the end of 2008 through to mid-2009.
Many topics are important not only within Australia and Japan, but also potentially for bilateral relations (for example, as novel dimensions to the FTA or ‘Economic Partnership Agreement’ already under negotiation between these two countries). Several topics (for example, the state of economics as a discipline after the GFC, neo-communitarian perspectives on comparative law and society, the legacy of the post-War Occupation of Japan) also address more broadly how we should (re)conceptualise law, economics and public policy particularly in the Asia-Pacific context.

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Unfair Consumer Contracts Law Reform in Australia (at last), Japan and Europe

Compared to Australian and New Zealand legislation, Japan’s Consumer Contracts Act 2000 has quite narrow restrictions on the bargaining process leading up to the conclusion of contracts between consumers and commercial suppliers (Luke Nottage ‘Nihon-Nyujirando Shohishakeiyakuho [Consumer Contract Law in Japan and New Zealand]’ 1620 Toki no Horei 4-5, June 2000). But it adds a ‘general clause’ regulating unfair contract terms, voiding those that ‘impair the interests of consumers unilaterally against the fundamental principle’ of good faith under Civil Code Art 1(2), as well as targeting some specific types of terms. The Consumer Contracts Act also extends to all types of contracts (except employment contracts: Art 48), and defines ‘consumer’ broadly as any individual not contracting for a business purpose (Art 2).

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Taniguchi Talk – Does the WTO Really Settle International Trade Disputes?

Professor Yasuhei Taniguchi presented a public lecture on this topic on 30 July at Sydney Law School, as part of the 2009 Distinguished Speakers series commemorating the inauguration of its new building in February. Drawing on his experience as a world-renowned civil law professor, arbitrator and WTO adjudicator, Taniguchi-sensei focused mainly on points of similarity and difference between the WTO dispute resolution system and national courts. His conclusion was a qualified “yes”, despite the main challenges still afflicting trade law litigation among states through the WTO system – the topic of a one-day symposium on 14 August, also at Sydney Law School.

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China, national security, and investment treaties

Peter Drysdale’s weekly editorial for the East Asia Forum, along with related postings to that blog and enormous media attention in Australia and elsewhere, focuses ‘on the continuing detention of Rio Tinto executive, Stern Hu, in Shanghai on allegations of espionage’. Drysdale signposts some future analysis of ‘the legal framework under which Hu’s detention has taken place’. He also emphasises that we need ‘a cooperative framework—bilaterally, regionally and globally‘ for ‘China’s authorities to avoid damage to the reliability of markets and for Australia to avoid the perception of investment protectionism’. The most pressing legal (and diplomatic) issues concern China’s criminal justice system, especially when ‘national security’ is allegedly involved. But we need already to consider some broader ramifications, including how we think about FDI legislation and (increasingly intertwined) investment treaty protections.
In short, most agree that the Chinese government got annoyed when Australia itself invoked national security interests to restrict Minmetals bid for OZ Minerals back in March 2009. Then it got really annoyed when Chinalco’s bid for Rio Tinto fell through, even though the Australian government wasn’t directly involved. And so, one story goes, Stern Hu has been arrested to send a message – in the hope that Australia (and other potential host states) will be think twice before invoking national security exceptions to restrict future FDI from China. The China-watchers are better placed to decide whether this is really the motivation behind his arrest. My point here is rather that we should not be surprised that host states may be increasingly tempted to invoke exceptions to limit FDI at the outset, which in turn generates risks of (over-)reactions by home states, as we may be witnessing in Hu’s case. And the initial temptation may arise due to proliferating investor-state arbitration provisions in investment treaties, because those later restrict their room to invoke national security or other limits once the FDI has been approved.

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Arb-Med and New International Commercial Mediation Rules in Japan

A recent issue of the Japan Commercial Arbitration Association (JCAA) Newsletter is largely devoted to these topics (No 22, July 2009). Sydney Law School and ANJeL are privileged to host not only one of Japan’s doyens in ICA (and other cross-border dispute resolution, especially WTO procedures), Professor Yasuhei Taniguchi (over July-August 2009). We also welcome (over September – March 2010) Kokushikan University Professor Tatsuya Nakamura, a leader of Japan’s ‘new generation’ of arbitration specialists who heads JCAA’s Arbitration Department.
They have already got me Download filethinking further about Arb-Med (arbitrators encouraging parties to settle their dispute), in the context also of interesting new JCAA Rules focused more specifically on Mediation. Both developments are important for Australia, presently reviewing its legislative and institutional framework for international commercial arbitration (ICA), as well as for many other Asia-Pacific countries intensely interested nowadays in efficient mechanisms to resolve cross-border disputes.

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