TOKYO — Sixty-eight new law schools opened across Japan in April to train legal professionals in a move partially designed to boost the number of lawyers in the country.
A total of 5,590 people enrolled at the schools set up at various universities.
They include doctors, public service employees, office workers and young people fresh out of university.
Specialized in educating those interested in becoming judges, prosecutors and lawyers, the new law schools offer two- and three-year courses with the former for holders of bachelor's degrees in law and the latter for those holding degrees in other subjects such as literature.
Law school graduates will train for 12 months at the Legal Research and Training Institute, which belongs to the Supreme Court, and become specialists in this new era for Japan's legal profession.
The establishment of law schools as well as a revision of the State Law Examination Law emerged as part of a series of judicial reforms which had been under discussion by the Judicial Reform Council.
Judges, prosecutors and practicing attorneys will lecture at the schools. In addition to studying basic subjects such as civil and criminal law, the students will learn about cutting-edge legal fields, including intellectual property, international transactions, the environment and social security.
Upon graduation, each student will receive a "doctor of judicial affairs degree" and become eligible to take the new bar exam set to be introduced in 2006. The current exam, which does not impose any restrictions on the qualifications of those taking the tests, will be abolished in 2011.
A system of preliminary tests for the new bar exam will be introduced the same year to give successful applicants the right to sit for it. The preliminary tests will be open to anyone.
The existing bar exam is notoriously difficult to pass and in fiscal only 1,070 out of 50,166 passed it 2003.
The government wants to increase this number to 3,000 beginning around 2010.
It plans to double the figure of lawyers to about 50,000 in 2018 from that at the present.
According to the Japan Federation of Bar Associations, the number of lawyers registered with it totaled 20,240 as of April 1.
Outside parties are expected to evaluate the law schools. The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Sciences and Technology is likely to put the National Institution for Academic Degrees and University Education, the Japan University Accreditation Association and the Japan Law Foundation in charge.
The evaluations will be made public and the state will call on schools that fail to meet the standards to improve them.
More than a dozen universities are likely to seek the ministry's approval to open law schools, indicating increased competition in the future.
The government has also decided to set aside 2.5 billion yen in the budget for the current fiscal year as grants for law schools run by private universities.
Shigeaki Tanaka, vice president of Kyoto University, said the number students without undergraduate law degrees or from the working world who were admitted to his university's law school this year totaled more than expected — 35% of the total — and that they were of high caliber.
The university's bid to attract people of diverse backgrounds to the legal profession appears to have been successful, Tanaka said. He added that the new training system for legal professionals and other reforms, including the introduction of new citizen judges to work with judges at trials, should trigger a change for the better for the entire judicial system.
Source: Japan Today
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