Australia, professor Leon Wolf

"People and the Courts in Australia and Japan: Through the Lens of Popular Culture"

Leon Wolff, an Associate Professor of law at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia.

Australia and Japan have contrasting legal systems, histories and cultures. Does this suggest that Australian and Japanese people have different attitudes towards law and the courts? This presentation seeks to explore popular attitudes towards the legal process in Australia by examining representations of litigation -- and the extent to which the judiciary achieves popular notions of justice and rights -- in Australian and Japanese popular culture, especially, television and movies. Although comparative statistics on litigation levels, caseloads and numbers of lawyers and judges are available, they are difficult to use for meaningful comparisons because of differences in measurements and collection techniques. Popular culture, although fraught with its own methodological challenges, offers fresh insight into attitudes and experiences about law through fictitious story-telling. The presentation offers the surprising conclusion that attitudes towards law and the courts in Australia and Japan are actually more similar than apparent differences in culture might at first suggest.