The new book, From Manners to Rules: Advocating for Legalism in South Korea and Japan (Cambridge, 2025), challenges the conventional wisdom that law and courts play marginal roles in Korean and Japanese politics.

Through paired comparisons of recent reforms related to disability rights and tobacco control, Professor Celeste Arrington documents the emergence of legalistic approaches to governance in the hard cases of Korea and Japan, where governance was previously characterized by nonbinding measures, bureaucratic discretion, and malleable, vague laws that couldn’t be used in court.

Whereas existing studies of legalism or the broader judicialization of politics elsewhere tend to emphasize top-down or structural factors, this new book reveals how activists and lawyers contribute from the bottom up to a more legalistic regulatory style by demanding and using more formal, detailed, and enforceable rules and participatory policy processes. This legalistic turn is reshaping the who and the how of policy design and implementation and transforming citizens options for political participation in East Asia’s main democracies.

The comparative research draws on 120 interviews and diverse documents from advocacy groups, court cases, and government bodies. This talk will present the book’s main argument with evidence related to disability-based discrimination and accessibility for people with disabilities in Korea and Japan.