A Research for the contents of court's decision recorded in documents, and an analyses of the logic behind the legal thinking for the reasoning or justification of decisions in medieval Japan

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This research has pursued mainly by collecting two kinds of data, in order to analyze the ways of describing decisions issued by the courts of the Kamakura Shogunate. In this research, therefore, it is also important aspects in observing the documents that we should examine what the style of legal thinking was, and how it was worked in approaching to each judgment. Furthermore, this research has focused on and analyzed the variety of reasons applied to each decision. The data are collected from almost of all contents of decisions which we can recognize in documents remained, originally issued to a party by the court. And this research also has demonstrated the trial procedure, particularly in a case of a party's negligence of summons. It can be said that the court did not automatically give a decision in favor of a party, because of the negligence. In justice system of Kamakura Shogunate, a party of negligence would be punished by the article No.35 of Goseibai-shikimoku, which wrote it as one of fundamental norms. So, in traditional understanding of such case, the norm was automatically adopted, without careful investigation for the circumstances. This research, which has tried to analyzed the contents of decisions, however, can show that the court of Kamakura Bakufu had a principle for judgment. The principle was that an insistence of a party could be reasoned correctly, only when obvious fact presented to the court by a party as a certain proof, whose form was a correct document style, and which also included a sort of custom law or one of laws issued by Kamakura Shogunate.