How Does Culture Count in Legal Change?: A Review with a Proposal from a Social Movement Perspective

We have in this volume four articles on legal change in China and Japan written by four distinguished authors. These articles vary with regard to subject state, specificity of issues, and breadth of analytical scope. They commonly discuss one factor, however: culture. The purpose of this Comment is to examine the way each article uses culture in its explanations of legal change.

The Comment concludes with a brief suggestion, from a social movement perspective, on employing culture as an explanatory tool in a non-essentialist way.