“Soft Law” refers to norms which are not necessarily enforced by courts or public authorities, but in fact bind the state or industries in the actual economy and society. “Soft law” takes many forms including norms released by states, produced by private companies and markets, or established in international relations. “Soft Law” is ambiguous yet exists everywhere in modern business law, carries considerable weight in actuality, and has enormous influence over economic activities.

This center is undertaking the following programs in the three major sections of business law: the public regulation section, the commercial transactions section, and the intellectual property section. 

In the public regulation section, there are many cases in which the soft-law regulations implemented by governmental institutions within the country and agreements between the regulating authorities of each country concerned, which basically should not have any international binding force, in fact wield considerable influence over business behavior. This program will survey the various forms taken in creating soft laws, arrange and classify them, and build a database.  The next step will be to conduct basic research and studies on the role of soft law, its legal characteristics, induced problems, directions for reform, etc.

In the commercial transactions section, it has become difficult to regulate business and consumer transaction by means of hard laws alone, due to the increasingly complicated financial and capital markets, as well as due to increasing sophistication and use of IT in commercial transactions between companies.  Consequently, in the financial and capital markets and in business circles, rules and norms are often formed autonomously. Each company obeys them, and the governmental institutions expect them to be improved. In forming international rules, too, the soft law methodology is gaining more and more support, whereby the contracting parties decide on their own initiative the unified rules to adopt and thus attempt to have internationally unified regulations. This program aims to collect and classify data on the soft laws produced and provided by business circles and the market to elucidate the actual situation and to build up a database.  Next, it aims to construct basic theories on why soft laws have prevailed in various fields, whether this phenomenon is rational in society, and what the relationship is between soft law and the norms provided by hard law.

In the intellectual property section, a “property” is produced without a basis in hard law by implicit understanding, customs, and contracts, and the “rights business” is  operated without undergoing sufficient legal examination. 

This program seeks to grasp the actual situation to see under which norms such intellectual property functions in our present society, and to elucidate the structures of actively functioning soft laws. This will help us to obtain a future vision of soft laws in the information asset field, which will become a highly significant asset in the 21st century.