The Legal Approach and Problems Concerning Employment Discrimination Laws

Employment discrimination laws have been developed in Japan. However, employment discrimination is diversified and is complicated by the diversification of society. As such, some researchers in the United States have pointed out that the traditional approach has been less effective. In this paper, the issues of the employment discrimination laws in Japan are classified with relation to the Japanese employment system. Next, changes of the employment discrimination laws in the United States are surveyed. Furthermore, referring to such changes in the United States, I examine the theoretical grounds of prohibition against employment discrimination, and report the problems of the traditional approach and the new problem-solved approach. In that part, the reasons that the traditional ruled-based approach cannot solve new types of discriminations are shown, and it is necessary to make a new system that encourages employers to cope with discrimination and persuade third parties to participate. Finally, I argue for the suitability of the new approach to the situation in Japan based on those theoretical investigations.