New Case Handbook Joho-Ho (Information Law)

Progress in digitalization has greatly changed the state of society and laws. As you can see from the invasion of privacy and online transactions, many current legal disputes are information-related, and new disputes are emerging one after another. It is difficult to capture the form of "information law" that continues to change dynamically. One factor is that there is no systematic code of law, such as the Constitution or Civil Code (and such codification is not considered appropriate). In general, to understand the law, simply looking at the law is not enough; it is also necessary to consider what is valuable (Case) as a precedent among the interpretations presented by the courts in dispute resolution. This also applies to the information law.
 
Prior to digitalization, information law developed around mass media, which were the main bodies of powerful information dissemination. HASEBE Yasuo, YAMAGUCHI Itsuko, and SHISHIDO George, ed. "100 Media Cases (2nd Edition)" (Yuhikaku, 2018) is an orthodox collection of legal cases on information law. This book, as an alternative, was edited with a new style as an information casebook that connects the past and the future.
 
The editorial policy of this book is as follows: After placing freedom of information distribution (Chapter 1) as the general theory, the book analyzes discipline of information focusing on content (Chapter 2), judicial cases of information law proper from the side of the nature of information in terms of privacy and personal information (Chapter 3), and from the side of the information distribution bearer (Chapter 5). Intellectual property law, in its entirety, is an information law that gathers important court cases from the viewpoint of information discipline (Chapter 4) and captures the effects of informatization on the entire law and order, including economic activities, administrative processes, criminal law, and court processes (Chapters 6-9).
 
Formally, I am an editor, but the researchers of my generation who represent various legal fields helped me selecting and arranging court cases and contributors. In particular, in the field of civil law, I think that the participation of Professor NAKAHARA Taro (Graduate School of Law and Politics) has made it a thick casebook. Associate Professor NARUSE Go (Graduate School of Law and Politics) also contributed about criminal law.
 
This book is a one-page one-case, and we tried to boldly summarize the contents of the court cases and explain them plainly. Institutions and practices related to court cases are also introduced. Fortunately, from not only lawyers and law students of the Faculty of Law but also researchers and practitioners in science, it is well received for its ability to grasp the overall picture in an easy-to-understand manner. If you are interested in the relationship between information and law, please try it and see.

 

(Written by SHISHIDO George, Professor, Graduate Schools for Law and Politics / 2021)