PLAN AFTER FISCAL YEAR 2007 (Interim Report [May, 2007])

Overall Research

International Symposium on Modern Legal Case Theory

The Fourth International Symposium was held in Lyon, France on October 4th and 5th2007. The overall theme of the symposium was "International Legal Business Disputes." Last year at the Second Symposium held in Freiburg, the main topic addressed was contractual problems related to substantive law and legal case procedure, whereas this year we discussed issues concerning substantive law and case procedure disputes in business as our main topic and analyzed issues at the national level and current trends in this area.
On March 1st and 2nd 2008, the Fifth International Symposium will be held in Nagoya. We are planning to address civil administration procedures and comparative legal research as the main theme at this symposium. While being an extremely important issue, comparative law relating to civil administrative procedures has rarely been addressed at the symposium as a main theme, and thus this time we will discuss the issue at length and in depth.
Publication of this Research's Findings　　We will publish the findings of each symposium that has been held so far (about three hundred pages per symposium) which will be eight journals in total (a book for each year from the first year until the final year) as a series in English, published through German publisher and will start to prepare for publication. As there is no appropriate journal or periodical which can publish our findings in a suitable international forum, it is necessary for us to publish our findings as a stand alone journal. Moreover, as the debates and discussions received favorable reviews, we have been advised to include these as a supplement. Also, we want to try and produce DVDs of all of the symposiums so that the actual discussions can be viewed as they were.

Research into National Civil Court Procedures

We will continue research into national civil court systems through working groups and we will hold comparative law research meetings from this year, in which researchers will address issues related to developments in the countries concerned.

In June, a research meeting between the Italian civil case law research group and the comparative law working group will be held in Padova, Italy. Also, in the same month in Helsinki, the Finnish group will hold a research meeting.
We will continue to hold comparative law research meetings and workshops which will focus on civil case law and research in Japan.
We will begin publishing the findings of our research and the essential information relating to national civil courts in English. Each country's entry will be roughly three hundred pages and Shinzan will be our publisher. We aim to publish sometime this year, now that Professor Andrews has finished his piece on U.K. law, and are currently preparing for publication.

Comparative Labor Law Research Group

The Comparative Labor Law Research Group will meet at the Second International Symposium in July 2007.

Civil Law Translation Working Group

This group will continue to work on translating civil law, as well as work on developing a translation reference dictionary.