Faculty of Law

This short comment describes and critiques the recent decision of the Osaka District Court against tattoo artist Masuda Taiki, convicted of conducting "medical practices" without a medical licence, contrary to section 17 of the Medical Practitioners' Act 1948. The decision is an instructive-and unedifying-example of Japanese prosecutorial practice and judicial reasoning at work, which undermines many scholarly attempts to defend or rehabilitate the characteristic features of Japanese law and legal procedure, especially in the criminal sphere. Particularly, the decision exhibits a perverse construction of the statutory provision in question, a failure adequately to distinguish between positive law and merely administrative material, and an overall lack of juristic rigour. This comment goes on to locate the issue of Japanese tattooing-and the official harassment of it-in its social context, applauding the defendant Masuda's defence of this counter-cultural practice.

Der kurze Kommentar enthalt eine zusammenfassende Analyse und Erwiderung auf einen viel beachteten Vortrag, den Professor Joseph Nye im Herbst 2015 an der Tōkyō Universitat gehalten hat. Professor Nye pladierte mit Nachdruck fur einen weiteren und verstarkten Ausbau der zunehmend umstrittenen Sicherheits-Allianz zwischen den USA und Japan. Dabei bezog er sich auf seinen einschlagigen Publikationen zu dem Thema. Er verteidigte die Entscheidung der japanischen Regierung unter Ministerprasident Abe, zu diesem Zweck die Friedensbestimmung in der Verfassung Japans und die dazu ergangenen Gesetze zu „re-inter­pretieren“. Er sprach die Bedeutung der wachsenden Macht Chinas ebenso an wie bisherige Dominanz der USA und die Wahscheinlichkeit, dass Frieden und Stabilitat in der Region erhalten blieben. Die Kommentierung evaluiert die Argumentation von Professor Nye, erganzt alternative Gesichtspunkte und zeigt mogliche Defizite in dessen Analyse auf, insbesondere bezuglich der komplexen verfas...

This note discusses the UK Supreme Court’s decision in Singularis Holdings v Daiwa Capital Markets in the context of other recent decisions on corporate attribution and the illegality principle in English law. It particularly considers Daiwa’s implications for the relationship between the illegality doctrine and other legal principles in the wake of Patel v Mirza. The court employed a context-sensitive, teleological approach to attribution, one consequence of which was the conclusive consignment of the House of Lords’ decision in Stone & Rolls Ltd v Moore Stephens to irrelevance. It nonetheless privileges orthodox, pre-Patelian authority in the disposal of the case. The court’s approach suggests that Patel is perceived as the high-water mark for expansive, policy-sensitive understanding of the illegality principle, and that its disruptive potential is likely to be carefully constrained in future decisions of the Supreme Court.

This article brings the insights produced by comparative legal analysis to bear on comparative legal discourse itself, in order instructively to recontextualize enduring methodological debates taken to concern the “philosophy” of comparative law. It grounds several such methodological arguments in fundamental positions of legal theory and philosophy, reflecting in doing so on the broader philosophical consequences of specific positions, and emphasizing the resulting problems of incommensurable positionality. It challenges the unvoiced but widely exhibited assumption within comparative law that sufficient reflection, abstraction and care can avoid the privileged reification of contingent legal concepts and categories. It explores the inevitable positionality of all comparative inquiry particularly in connection with the comparatist’s status as both product and reconstituter of legal facts and ideation. It introduces a focus on relative perspective, urging increased attention to how t...

Das Sozialhilfegesetz von 1950 ermachtigt die japanischen Kommunalverwaltungen dazu und verlangt von ihnen, dass sie Sozialhilfezahlungen an finanziell bedurftige „kokumin“ (Staatsburger) leisten. Eine Mitteilung des japanischen Ministeriums fur Gesundheit aus dem Jahr 1954 („1954-Mitteilung“) weist die Kom­mu­nalverwaltung an, de facto Sozialhilfezahlungen in gleicher Weise an Auslander wie an japa­nische Staatsburger zu leisten. Der japanische OGH hat kurzlich ein Berufungsurteil des Obergerichts Fukuoka aufge­hoben, in dem das OG festgestellt hatte, dass die 1954-Mitteilung, zusam­men mit dem von Japan ratifizierten internationalen Abkommen uber die Rechts­stellung von Flucht­lingen, auslandischen Staatsangehorigen ein einklagbares Recht auf Sozialhilfeleistungen einraume, welches denen eines japanischen Staats­an­ge­horigen gleichgestellt sei. Der OGH beharrte bei seiner Zuruckweisung eines solchen Rechts darauf, an dem wortlichen Inhalt des Gesetzes festzuhalten, und erachtete ...

This article aims at providing with a series of guiding hypothesis for the argument on the EU politics for refugee protection and international migration governance. It sheds light on three aspects of "crisis" that could jeopardise the EU stability-(a) limits of institutionalisation, (b) lack of capability for governance, and (c) the myth of solidarity. Firstly, policy-making on refugee protection and international migration governance is difficult to manage because the feasibility is unpredictable. More substantially, there are no concurrent goals for achievement: we could rarely agree on which policy is ideal for the migrants and the citizens in the receiving countries. Also, the EU member states opted for "venue-shopping (Guiraudon)" and promoted more policy harmonisation on restrictive measures than other measures such as reception conditions for and social inclusion of migrants. There is a political inaction on the part of policy-makers, on one hand, due to the exclusive "culture (Zaiotti)" composed by interior (or Justice and Home Affairs) officials in Brussels, both at the European Commission and the Council, while on the other hand, on the ground of less motivation for integration on social policies which are redistributive as nature. Secondly, the EU should face criticism by its lack of governability, i.e., its failure to seek for the point to coordinate the cost-benefit on the part of migrants and the native citizens. In this regards, the advocates of the benevolent activities also need to face criticism because they fail to criticise this point. Even academics could not extend their criticism to access the EU governance mechanism of balancing out the tension between natives and migrants: they have been advocates for the migrants (refugees) only-or else, for the native population only. The governability of the EU has not been part of the debate, hence spoiled the political actors eventually.

This article investigates the act of state toward international migration. Despite the fact that migration is complete only after states accept migrants to enter, the academics have heretofore paid little attention to whether and how the border control by states affects migration. This article attempts to show how a political approach to examine the state border control can be useful to the study of migration. It also argues that the political approach will be significant to understand the international cooperation on migration management (or the Common Migration Management) that has come into existence quite recently.