Frank K. Upham

Law and social change in postwar Japan

One: Models of Law and Social Change Two Western Models A Japanese Model Two: Environmental Tragedy and Response Pollution in Minamata The Choice of Tactics The Governments Response Historical and Social Context of the Pollution Experience Three: Instrumental Violence and the Struggle for Buraku Liberation Development of the Buraku Liberation Movement The Yata Denunciation Denunciation Tactics in Court The Theory and Effectiveness of Denunciation Denunciation in Social and Political Context Four: Civil Rights Litigation and the Search for Equal Employment Opportunity The Litigation Campaign Impact of the Cases The Social and Political Role of Civil Rights Litigation Five: Legal Informality and Industrial Policy The Legal Framework of Industrial Policy The Sumitomo Metals Incident The Oil Cartel Cases Industrial Policy in the 1980s The Implications of Informality Six: Toward a New Perspective on Japanese Law The Ideology of Law in Japanese Society The Operation of Law in Japanese Society American Images of Japanese Law Notes Index

The Evolution of Relational Property Rights: A Case of Chinese Rural Land Reform

The most notable, or at least the most noted, form of property evolution has been the transfer of exclusive rights from collectives to individuals and vice versa, such as the farm collectivization in Soviet Union and the establishment of the People’s Communes in Mao’s China and their reversals. Such radical moments, however, constitute only a small part of history. For the most part, property rights evolve quietly and incrementally, which is hard to explain if we take exclusive rights as the core of property, or, to put it more generally, if we are focusing solely on the question of who owns the things. To describe the evolution of property rights in China, we employ the concept of relational property. It is a concept that is heavily influenced by Joseph William Singer’s “social relations model” and Ian Macneil’s “relational contract” and, in particular, their emphasis on the determinative role of social relations in the construction of property and contract rights. The bundle of sticks metaphor is at the heart of relational property because it recognizes that property rights can be, and often are, disaggregated as they adapt to changing social, economic, and technological demands. As we show in the context of the reform of Chinese rural land, the combination of the metaphor of separable interests — the sticks in the bundle — and the dependence of property interests on social relationships can explain the evolution of property rights more accurately than a perspective that stresses a single central meaning of property.

China’s Changing Property Law Landscape

This chapter provides an outline of the changing Chinese land regime, including the past, present, and future of land expropriation, small or informal property rights, and rural land reform. We argue that the evolution of Chinese land law exhibits three characteristics. First, law serves as the final confirmation of policy reforms, rather than the precondition of the reform. Second, there is no individual land ownership, and public land ownership (including both state land ownership in the urban area and collective land ownership in the rural area) still matters. Third, due to the rapidly changing nature of the Chinese economy and society, property rights in action are often a pale shadow of what their legal entitlements would indicate in theory. As a result of these three characteristics, Chinese land law poses two related challenges to conventional property theory. First is one of the rarely questioned verities of economic theory: that clear, secure, and judicially enforceable property rights are an essential – perhaps the most essential – prerequisite to economic growth. The second question grows directly out of the first. China’s growth has come through voluntary market exchange on a massive scale, and in this sense fully vindicates economic theory. The challenge is to understand how these markets – in our case, the real estate market – operate without the legal framework considered necessary for Coasian bargaining. We propose a relational property theory as one explanation of what has enabled the market, without any legal rules or judicial enforcement, to thrive on a literally global scale. Relational property emphasizes the determinative role of social relations in the construction of property. The most important normative implication is that relational property can function without the full and faithful implementation of formal property law; but property law cannot function without embedding itself in social relations.

IOLE in the United States: The Relationship Between a Country’s Legal System and Its Legal Education

Legal education in the US, and its internationalisation, is largely affected and shaped by the larger legal system within which is exists. The US is a federal jurisdiction which has an unusually large amount of separate sovereign state jurisdictions within it, which are large and very diverse. Further, the American legal profession is radically unified (in that there is little separation between the various tracks of the profession) but at the same time, all branches of the profession are deeply enmeshed in partisan politics. These factors, as well as the size and diversity of American legal education means that the extent to which there is, and will be, IOLE in the US varies greatly across states, law schools, and students. The most prominent issues in current legal education debates pertain to the cost and the degree to which the typical law school prepares its students to practice more or less immediately after graduation. Neither of these issues will encourage further internationalisation, but the high degree of internationalisation of American society means that the ability to be a global lawyer, with sensitivity to the possibility of trans-border issues, would enhance most lawyers’ practice.

Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle: the Rules of Scandal in Japan and the United States (review)

instead of katoki (transition period) (p. 163). I hope these errors can be corrected in the next printing of the work. Overall, Gaunder’s study is well written and persuasive. She was fortunate to interview important political actors, including Ozawa, and her interview results effectively strengthen her argument. Gaunder’s efforts to include risk taking, vision, and commitment to evaluate political leadership will be highly appreciated by scholars of leadership studies.