TY - JOUR
T1 - New Challenge of Legal Studies in Twenty-First-Century Asia
T2 - Towards a Sustainable Society
AU - Kurumisawa, Yoshiki
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Since the 1990s, the Japanese social structure has been changing mainly due to economic globalization. The gap between rich and poor has been widened. The economic policy of the government that tries to introduce the market-competition principle into all sectors in order to revive economic growth is promoting such social change. It seems illusionary that either activating market competition or the reconstruction of the welfare state could revive economic growth. Instead, we should consider a transformation from an industrial to a sustainable society as an inevitable course of social development in the twenty-first century. In 2015, the Japanese Association of the Sociology of Law (JASL) held a symposium entitled Law and Legal Science in the Transformation to Sustainable Society during its annual meeting. The main issue was which role legal studies can/must play in such a transformation. I think there are two different approaches. One is to establish the sustainable principle as a legal principle like the precautionary principle in environmental law. The other approach is to reconsider and reconstruct fundamental legal categories of modern law, which have supported industrial society as its legal infrastructure. This approach will be the subject of the paper. I will deal with the case of property rights to agricultural land.
AB - Since the 1990s, the Japanese social structure has been changing mainly due to economic globalization. The gap between rich and poor has been widened. The economic policy of the government that tries to introduce the market-competition principle into all sectors in order to revive economic growth is promoting such social change. It seems illusionary that either activating market competition or the reconstruction of the welfare state could revive economic growth. Instead, we should consider a transformation from an industrial to a sustainable society as an inevitable course of social development in the twenty-first century. In 2015, the Japanese Association of the Sociology of Law (JASL) held a symposium entitled Law and Legal Science in the Transformation to Sustainable Society during its annual meeting. The main issue was which role legal studies can/must play in such a transformation. I think there are two different approaches. One is to establish the sustainable principle as a legal principle like the precautionary principle in environmental law. The other approach is to reconsider and reconstruct fundamental legal categories of modern law, which have supported industrial society as its legal infrastructure. This approach will be the subject of the paper. I will deal with the case of property rights to agricultural land.
KW - agricultural-land law
KW - commercialization of land
KW - cultivators-based principle
KW - legal assistance
KW - property rights
KW - sustainability
KW - universality of law and context
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U2 - 10.1017/als.2020.7
DO - 10.1017/als.2020.7
M3 - Review article
AN - SCOPUS:85087076261
VL - 6
SP - 395
EP - 412
JO - Asian Journal of Law and Society
JF - Asian Journal of Law and Society
SN - 2052-9015
IS - 2
ER -