Judicial Independence in Civil Law Regimes: Econometrics from Japan

Eric Bennett Rasmusen, Kelley School of Business, Indiana University
J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard Law School

Abstract

Judges in Japan cannot be fired if their decisions offend the government, but they follow a career path in which the location and type of positions they hold may be subject to political influence. We have obtained a comprehensive record of career assignments for judges educated after the Second World War. We couple data on judicial output (the quantity and nature of a judge's opinions) with these career records. We examine judges who began their careers 1961-65, focussing on the Class of 1965, for whom we have determined the number of pro- and anti- government decisions. If the promotion process is politicized, the marginal impact of individual politically deviant cases will decline over the course of a judge's career, since the political opinions of older judges have already become clear to the administration. This does seem to be the case in our logit regressions.