Germany and Japan: A Legal Dialogue between Two Economies

Authors

Harald Baum (ed)

Synopsis

In 2011, the German-Japanese relationship was marked by celebration of “150 years of Japanese-German Friendship”. For a century and a half, Japan and Germany (initially Prussia) have enjoyed a deep and genuine friendship that has been historically free of acrimony, likely making it unique in the international relations of the Federal Republic of Germany. Japan remains one of Asia’s leading nations and is the only one among them to have had a legal system shaped on western European conceptions for more than a hundred years. For a long time, it was the only country outside of the “western” sphere that was on equal economic and political footing with the industrialized nations of those regions, while at the same time remaining historically and culturally Asian.

On 21 and 22 October 2011, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg, in cooperation with Hamburg’s Bucerius Law School, the German-Japanese Association of Jurists, the Japanese Consulate General in Hamburg, and the Center of Excellence at Waseda University in Tokyo, hosted a comparative law symposium entitled “Germany and Japan: A Legal Dialogue between Two Economies.” The contributions to this conference are presented here in revised and edited form. Delivered partly in German and partly in English, the lectures covered a broad spectrum, featuring papers on the historical background of Germany and Japan’s modernization of their economic and legal systems in the latter half of the 19th and the early part of 20th centuries, on questions of commercial law and the liability of company directors, on various aspects of corporate governance and the increasingly urgent issue of corporate compliance in both countries, and on current issues in the fight against piracy.

[Excerpt from Foreword]

Chapters

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Published

August 1, 2012