Japan: Where lawyers screw the law students

[Taro Toporific]

Legal Wrangling/Raising the bar
Asahi Shimbun, Oct 14
New law students are flummoxed by the timing of an announcement about plans to yank their apprenticeship grants worth millions of yen. ...
...The government is not only finagling with bar-exam graduation rates, it also plans to wipe out grants for legal apprenticeships, which all students take for a year. The plan is to start in fiscal 2006, when this year's newest students will be ready to pass the bar.
And here's the rub: The government only decided to announce this radical change to the grant system in June, months after all those mid-career professionals had quit their jobs to go back to school.
... The Japan Federation of Bar Associations, meanwhile, is against the loans, claiming no one should be barred from legal studies just because they are poor. ...