Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession in Nineteenth Century Japan. By Darryl E. Flaherty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2013. 335 pp. $35.38 hardcover.
Date | 01 December 2014 |
Published date | 01 December 2014 |
DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/lasr.12117 |
the word “measure” itself to a more ethical interpretation—one
rescued by its poetic origins and imaginative possibility (p. 174). The
Humanities and Public Life thus stands as both a “model of ” and
a “model for” ethical reading (Geertz 1973). And invites us to
respond to misreadings with rereadings.
References
Cole, David (2009) “The Torture Memos: The Case against the Lawyers,” The New York
Review of Books, October 8. Available at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/
2009/oct/08/the-torture-memos-the-case-against-the-lawyers/ (accessed 11 Sep
2014).
Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretationof Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books.
∗∗∗
Public Law, Private Practice: Politics, Profit, and the Legal Profession
in Nineteenth Century Japan. By Darryl E. Flaherty. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard Univ. Asia Center, 2013. 335 pp. $35.38 hardcover.
Reviewed by John O. Haley, Vanderbilt Law School
Darryl Flaherty’s Public Law, Private Practice is an elegantly
written, exhaustively researched, and profoundly insightful study
of Japan’s legal profession as it evolved through the nineteenth
century. Anyone with serious interest in comparative perspectives
on legal profession and law and development—not to mention
those simply interested in Japan’s legal transformation from the
late Tokugawa period to the end of the Meiji era—will discover new,
provocative insights.
A few readers of this review may wonder how a study on the
Japanese legal profession in the nineteenth century could possibly
have much significance or attract any interest beyond a handful of
legal historians concerned with a culturally distinctive and there-
fore largely irrelevant country on the fringe of continental Asia.
Keep in mind, however, that the same might have been said for
the United Kingdom and the relevance of the English or North
American legal professions in the nineteenth century. The United
Kingdom and its North American colonies uniquely benefited from
a combination of factors, not the least of which was the advent of a
handful of immigrants to remote and largely inhospitable locations
north of the extraordinarily wealthy and culturally advanced
Castilian domains to the south.
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