Publisher's Synopsis
"This is the first monograph on Suehiro in the English language. As the representative figure of the law and society movement in Japan, a study of Suehiro helps us go much deeper into the often-neglected jurisprudential aspects of Japanese history. Far from being a matter of poring over dusty lawbooks and parsing legalese, law-and-society studies helps us see the kaleidoscopic interaction among elites and common people in the roiling 1920s and 30s, greatly complicating and enriching our view of Japanese society (and law) as a whole. Also, Suehiro is our entrepôt into an intellectual history of law-and-society study in Japan. He was in the thick of the social changes of the mid to late Taisho and early Showa periods, and was able to translate what he saw around him into the theoretical and legal planes with great fluency. He could translate in the other direction with equal facility. For his time as well as for ours, Suehiro was, and is,
