Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth Century Japan. By Darryl E. Flaherty Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2013. 335 pp. $35.38 hardcover.

Abstract

Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth Century Japan. By Darryl E. Flaherty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2013. 335 pp. $35.38 hardcover.Darryl Flaherty's Public Law, Private Practice is an elegantly written, exhaustively researched, and profoundly insightful study of Japan's legal profession as it evolved through the nineteenth century. Anyone with serious interest in comparative perspectives on legal profession and law and development-not to mention those simply interested in Japan's legal transformation from the late Tokugawa period to the end of the Meiji era-will discover new, provocative insights.A few readers of this review may wonder how a study on the Japanese legal profession in the nineteenth century could possibly have much significance or attract any interest beyond a handful of legal historians concerned with a culturally distinctive and therefore largely irrelevant country on the fringe of continental Asia. Keep in mind, however, that the same might have been said for the United Kingdom and the relevance of the English or North American legal professions in the nineteenth century. The United Kingdom and its North American colonies uniquely benefited from a combination of factors, not the least of which was the advent of a handful of immigrants to remote and largely inhospitable locations north of the extraordinarily wealthy and culturally advanced Castilian domains to the south.Flaherty's study is significant because he tells, in elegant prose and great detail, the story of continuity, correspondence, and change in the exemplary political and economic transformation of this small archipelago theretofore in self-imposed isolation. In the middle of the century, Japan had been long ruled by warrior elites within a legal order based on an even more ancient-but, by almost any contemporary measure, highly advanced-public law order derived from the imperial Chinese tradition. Its continental neighbors included two of the world's three oldest and wealthiest bureaucratic empires-the Russians to the north and the Chinese to the west and south. And like them, it had withstood for three centuries the sequential threats of cultural if not military conquest in turn by upstart, empire-building kingdoms in Western Europe. In sequence, they included Spain and Portugal in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Netherlands in the eighteenth, and now, as the nineteenth century and the industrial revolution dawned, France and England, the most powerful, expansive, and, in this new era, enlightened of all. At the end of the century, Japan remained not only one of only a handful of independent states that had not been either absorbed by an imperial neighbor or colonized or even subdued by any West European kingdom. Instead, it had itself become an industrial, military, and even colonial power, defeating neighboring empires in war as had almost simultaneously the United States, also a newly arrived member of club of world powers and rival in the Pacific.The story of Japan's transformation is especially a story of law. By the end of the century, Japan had not only independently established the most advanced Western legal system outside of the West but, like its Western colonial counterparts, was in the process of reforming in like measure the legal systems of Taiwan and Korea, its two colonial territories. It would also become the model for legal reforms undertaken by the only other remaining independent polities in East Asia-China and Siam.Today, in terms of nominal GNP, China and Japan have the second and third largest national economies in the world and in terms of per capita income as well as equal distribution of that wealth, the first of Japan's two colonies, Taiwan, rivals Germany, and the second, South Korea, rivals France. Japan itself rivals the greatest imperial power of the nineteenth century, the United Kingdom. All three are today stable and functioning constitutional democracies in which transfers of political authority without violence or any significant social disruption has become the norm. …