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

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.