NOTE: The following is my account of a talk by Professor Mark Ramseyer (Chicago
Law School) titled: "Party Politics and Judicial Independence in Japan: New
Evidence" held at Harvard.

I post this to encourage debate on a topic that has not been systematically
researched but has wide comparative implications. The aim of Professor
Ramseyer's talk, I gather, was to fill in this gap. (I apologize in advance for
any misrepresentations of his talk.)

(1) The talk was based on a coauthored paper by Professor Ramseyer to test
whether the LDP can exert influence over the promotion pattern of Judges for
political purposes. Any possibility of judiciary independence being questioned
is something the Japanese judiciary strongly denies.

(2) The body of the argument contained impressive analysis of what determines
career success of Japanese judges.

(3) There were two interesting conclusions: (a) It was proved that judges who
joined the Young Jurists League (a leftist organization related to the Communist
party) in the 1960's were still receiving less attractive jobs than their peers
in the 1980s.

(b) More controversially, judges who decided cases against the government tended
to receive less attractive jobs than their peers. Thus the analysis confirmed
the presence of political bias within the operation of the Japanese judiciary.

(4) The talk was a very impressive and convincing presentation (which cannot be
represented in this post) of what determines the successful careers as judges
and proof that judges of the YJL were disadvantaged in their promotion;
something that has not been proved empirically. Most of the discussion focused
on whether the analysis confirmed LDP bias in the promotion of judges. But it
was clear that whoever wants to deny such charges would have to come up with
more a compelling and systematic analysis, and not just impressionistic
accounts.

Nobuhiro Hiwatari