ALSA 2025 meeting

Japanese sociology of law began with research on the rights of common, achieving success in having courts recognize these rights as customary rights. However, in recent years, with the advancement of compliance-oriented legalization, forestlands with improper registration where rights of common are recognized have become problematic as “lands with unknown owners,” prompting the enactment of laws to regularize these situations.
This paper first explains the differences between previous legalization studies and the current societal trend emphasizing compliance. Then, based on interviews and questionnaire surveys with forestry cooperative staff, it depicts how compliance-oriented legalization is actually progressing.
When forestry cooperatives, which receive logging commissions from communities, emphasize compliance and verify forestland ownership based on official registration, obtaining consent from all numerous owners becomes necessary, causing high transaction costs and triggering a tragedy of the anti-commons. Therefore, in practice, a simplified procedure relying on customary rights and securing consent from community leaders is employed. However, this is not a legal consciousness based on an understanding of the customary rights of common but rather a calculated rationality that simplifying procedures is unlikely to cause problems.
By illustrating how the customary rights of common are actually perceived and used, this paper attempts to bridge traditional socio-legal studies on customary rights and new research on legal consciousness.