Taishinin’s Judicial Behavior in Corruption Cases

Legal transplant in the Meiji Restoration gave birth to Taishinin, which is the former of today’s Supreme Court of Japan, but the objective of it was not solely for legal justice at the beginning. Taishinin’s criminalization of corruption as an offense was out of both legal and non-legal factors. Law is often unclear and general because legislator cannot foresee all modus operandi in future. Judges’ judicial decision-making and sentencing practices have space to interpret it with opinions, discretion, legal consciousness and innovation for an immediate legal effect of criminal justice on society. This book applies robust judicial behavior concept to analyze how Taishinin’s judicial behavior of such factors rationalized its rulings on corruption cases. This is not only a matter of transplanted “Western jacket” of Germanic Penal Code, but also departmental internal instructions, integrity standards and traditional legal consciousness of unwritten codes of conduct. The original findings of this book reveal that Taishinin’s judicial behavior in corruption cases was subject to many non-legal considerations, such as historical development of anticorruption law, traditional jurisprudential concepts, mission of and commitment to judicial role, values, judge appointment, judicial training and the political impacts of Ministry of Justice’s administration of judiciary.