Gatekeepers: A Comparative Critique of Admission to the Legal Profession and Japan's New Law Schools

Abstract

Introduction Legal education in Japan has been fundamentally reconstituted in the first decade of the twenty-first century.1 These changes are situated within both international trends and far-reaching domestic administrative and judicial reforms. To date, the literature concerning Japan�s legal education reforms has focused on the most visible change: the repositioning of graduate law schools (hōka daigakuin) as the central institution in the training of Japan�s legal profession (in the narrow sense of judges, attorneys and prosecutors). In the English literature, there is consensus that retention of the �bottleneck� entry examination (shihō shiken) governing entry to the apprenticeship/practical phase of training (�Bar Examination� is the closest English equivalent) is a grave threat to the fragile infancy of the 74 new law schools.2 This concern exposes a deeper dynamic about who controls admission to the legal profession and by what means.