Japan’s Legal Technical Assistance: A Different Modernization Narrative?¹

Scholarship examining the legal transplantation phenomenon suggests we are witnessing a continuum of five distinct periods of foreign aid or donor-propelled legal reform worldwide, namely: a pre-history of colonial legal development (to the 1960s); the inaugural moment of US legal development cooperation (1965-1974); the critical moment (1974-1989); the revivalist moment (1989-1998); and the “post” moment (1998 to the present) (Newton 2006). Similarly, but employing a slightly different taxonomy, one of the American protagonists in the “inaugural moment” has declared this present period to be a “third moment” of Law and Development (Trubek 2006). I would argue that both views are too narrow and fail to capture the complexity and breadth of 21st century donor-driven legal reform.