The Role of Lawyers in Criminal Justice

我在东京的调查研究表明，律师的主要领域是个人拥有的房地产、继承、离婚和小公司的业务。虽然随着国际事务领域的迅速扩大，为大公司提供的法律服务似乎有所增加，但这似乎并没有改变东京法律工作的基本结构。负责刑事案件的律师数量似乎正在减少。在东京三大律师协会注册的律师中，法院指定的律师只占不到20%。他们大多是从业10年以下的初级律师和老律师，少数是对刑事辩护工作有个人兴趣的资深律师。与此相反，许多律师认为聘请律师的工作与普通民事案件类似。法院指定的律师似乎不像聘请的律师那样积极工作。然而，这可能只是反映了大多数法庭指定律师案件的性质，在这些案件中，被告向警方认罪，而不与检察官抗辩。在这一点上，我们有必要进一步厘清辩护活动与案件性质的关系。将东京的情况与公设辩护人制度产生的20世纪10年代的美国情况进行比较，可以发现法院指定辩护人制度存在的一些问题与之有些相似。然而，日本的解决方案可能与美国不同，因为日本的律师组织以个人或小型办公室从业者为主，他们具有与商业律师不同的传统专业价值观。

My survey research in Tokyo shows that major fields of the lawyers are those of real estates owned by individuals, inheritance, divorce, and those of small companies. Though legal service for large corporations seem to increase with the rapid expansion of the international affairs field, it does not seem to have changed the basic structure of the legal work in Tokyo.2. The number of lawyers who handle criminal cases seem to be decreasing. Lawyers who work as court-appointed counsels occupy less than 20% of the lawyers registered at the three bar associations in Tokyo. Most of them are junior bar members with 10 years experience or less, old lawyers, and a rather small number of experienced lawyers with personal interests in criminal defense work. In contrast, retained-counsel work is taken by a wide range of lawyers as work similar to ordinary civil cases.3. Court-appointed counsels do not seem to work as actively as retained-counsels. However, it may simply reflect the nature of most court-appointed counsel cases in which the defendants confessed to the Police and do not contest against the prosecutors. On this point, we have to further clarify the relationship between defense activity and the nature of a case.4. When we compare the Tokyo situation with the American counterpart in the 1910's in which the public defender system emerged, we find some problems of court-appointed counsel system somewhat similar. However, the Japanese solution rfiay be different from that of the U. S., since the Japanese bar organizations are dominated by solo or small office practitioners who have traditional professional values different from business lawyers.