Theoretical Research on Evaluation and Methods for Legal Assistance Activities

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In recent years, Asian countries that are in the process of shifting from the socialist system to the market economy system are seeking human resources and knowledge-based assistance from foreign countries, particularly Japan, in order to build up a new legal infrastructure responsive to the move to marketization. Japanese government has started its legal assistance programs for Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, etc, since 1996. However, in the course of implementing these programs, some fundamental questions emerged. Among them are questions asking what the philosophy of legal assistance is and what areas of law should be the targets for providing assistance. In this priority area research, academic reviews of the ongoing legal assistance activities in the field are conducted with a view to constructing a new discipline on legal assistance studies.The research group has two objectives. First, it seeks to construct a framework for "the New Generation of Comparative Law Studies", which will enable the operation and evaluation of legal assistance projects to benefit from the achievements made by the information science. On that basis, it also examines the possibility of concretizing this framework. Second, it seeks to establish methods for evaluating legal assistance activities, by applying the existing evaluation methods in the field of public administration.Findings and outcomes of the research are published in the form of a report on "Information Foundation of Legal Assistance : A New Framework for Comparative Law Studies" (Matsuura Yoshiharu, F. Bennett, Yoro Shinichi, Tanaka Kikuo, eds). The objectives of this report are not confined to the narrow aspect of developing evaluation methods, but also to bring together different research findings from the perspective of "constructing the framework for a new generation of comparative law studies". We expect that further research will be conducted on the basis of these achievements.