摘要：Half a century after abolishing its jury system, the Japanese Diet enacted the Act Concerning Participation of Lay Assessors in Criminal Trials ("Lay Assessor Act") on May 28, 2004. 1 Despite repeated attempts by scholars and groups to restore the jury system every few years since the end of World War II, legislators largely ignored these proposals until the "serendipity of events" that led to the development of the Judicial Reform Council in June 1999. 2 The Lay Assessor Act (hereafter the "Act"), or "saiban-in-seido" in Japanese, 3 establishes a mixed panel composed of professional judges and lay assessors that decides specific types of criminal cases. The Act will come into force before 2009 4 and legislators will perform an "additional investigation" three years after the law comes
