Izutaro Suehiro (1888–1951) was a Japanese legal scholar whose work encompassed civil law, labor law, and the sociology of law. As a professor at Tokyo Imperial University, he challenged approaches that treated law as a self-contained system of statutes and concepts, emphasizing judicial decisions and the “living law” found in actual social relations. He helped establish labor law as a field of study in Japan, contributed to the drafting of the country’s postwar labor legislation, and served as the first chairman of the Central Labour Relations Commission. In “Uso no Koyo,” a collection named for an essay meaning “The Usefulness of Lies,” Suehiro explains how legal fictions can allow an outdated rule to accommodate new social realities, exposing the gap between the formal language of law and the way law operates in practice.
