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.

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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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