Major in Civil Law & Major in Public Law

The Graduate School of Law offers two majors in the field of law: Civil Law and Public Law. The Major in Civil Law focuses on research in fields such as civil law, commercial law, civil procedure law, private international law, and intellectual property law. In the Major in Public Law, research topics include constitutional law, administrative law, tax law, international law, criminal law, and criminal procedure law. Depending on their individual research themes, students may major in either Civil Law or Public Law to pursue studies in areas such as fundamental legal studies (e.g., philosophy of law, sociology of law, and legal history), foreign law, social law (e.g., economic law and labor law), and environmental law.

In the master’s program of the Major in Public Law, a specialized track in space law has been established in collaboration with JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) to train legal professionals engaged in space activities (for details, please refer to the Specialized Tracks page).

The guiding principle and educational objective of both the Major in Civil Law and the Major in Public Law is to encourage students, with a strong motivation to identify and analyze diverse social phenomena and issues from a legal perspective, to deepen their knowledge of law in their fields of specialization and to acquire fundamental legal theories and legal reasoning that underpin various legal systems, thereby contributing to the development of society and scholarship. By permitting, to a certain extent, the enrollment in courses offered by the Law School, which is dedicated to the training of legal professionals, the Graduate School cultivates the ability to harmonize theory and practice. In recent years, interdisciplinary research has also been encouraged through projects at Keio University supported by JST (Support for Pioneering Research Initiated by the Next Generation). The Graduate School trains individuals who can thrive as highly specialized professionals, including in corporate legal departments, by cultivating legal scholars who possess not only advanced expertise and analytical abilities in their own fields but also a grounding in other disciplines and fundamental legal studies, and by fostering a legal mind capable of addressing real-world social issues from a legal perspective.