ABSTRACT Japanese judges are least likely to hang a defendant for murder if they graduated from a high-status university, passed the bar-exam-equivalent quickly, or enjoy a fast-track career within the courts. “Panel composition effects” and other measures of collegiality seem unrelated to sentencing patterns. To explore the effect of judicial panel composition beyond the more-often-st…
ABSTRACT Japanese patients file relatively few medical malpractice claims. Most scholars try to explain this phenomenon by identifying ‘‘faults’’ in the Japanese judicial system. Largely, the faults they identify do not exist. Instead, a substantial part of the reason for the malpractice claiming patterns may lie in the national health insurance system. In order to contain the cost…