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"Acknowledgements" [ 2010] ELECD 150 ; in Tanase, Takao; Nottage, Luke; Wolff, Leon (eds), "Community and the Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Community and the Law

Editor(s): Tanase, Takao; Nottage, Luke; Wolff, Leon

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848447851

Section Title: Acknowledgements

Number of pages: 3

Extract:

Acknowledgements
In 2005, the Boalt School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley,
hosted a Sho Sato Conference to honour Tanase. Early versions of this book's
chapters were shared with American socio-legal scholars, critical cultural
theorists and Japanese law experts. This was the first time a wider sample of
Tanase's legal sociology was made available, to much acclaim, to the English-
speaking research community.1 By making this work available to the wider
English-speaking community of socio-legal researchers, this book directly
confronts one of the persistent problems afflicting socio-legal studies today.
Despite the globalised academic market, the language barrier continues to
prevent many researchers from accessing the ideas of non-English-speaking
researchers such as Tanase. Not only does this hinder the free exchange of
ideas, but it also traps socio-legal research into generalising from a narrow
data-set of Anglo-American common law or European continental law tradi-
tions. Socio-legal research suffers, concludes Tamanaha (2001, p. vii),
precisely because it fails to capture the experiences of non-Western systems.
Although a translated and edited collection, Tanase remained very much in
command. He selected the essays for inclusion; updated the chapters in light
of new legal developments (especially Chapter 4); reviewed the draft transla-
tions; and prepared an introductory chapter to frame the unifying themes and
concerns, specifically for this volume (Chapter 1). As translators and editors,
we aimed to preserve Tanase's voice as faithfully as possible. As translators,
we ...