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Legal Education

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Vanderbilt Law Review

2007

Bar exam

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Making Lawyers (And Gangsters) In Japan, Mark D. West Mar 2007

Making Lawyers (And Gangsters) In Japan, Mark D. West

Vanderbilt Law Review

How insulting to have juxtaposed "lawyers" and "gangsters" in the title, to hint that lawyers are not engaged in a supremely noble profession, to insinuate a commonality between counselors-at-law and godfathers. There will be no explicit comparisons here, for this is an Essay about Japanese legal education, not La Cosa Nostra. Instead I offer a description of how Japan trains its lawyers and what lawyers in Japan do. I'll also talk a bit about how gangsters in Japan are trained, and what they do. Perhaps a serendipitous connection will present itself.

I begin by briefly discussing the old system of …