Now, as then, one development that often follows modern scandal is the enactment of rules to combat the evil that is assumed to have caused to it. Take corporate scandals. Sokaiya scandals in Japan led to increased penalties for payments to gangsters. A string of corporate scandals that included the fall of Yamaichi Securities led to an American- style corporate governance option in the Commercial Code. In the United States, WorldCom and Enron led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, arguably the most thorough securities law revisions since the New Deal. This book has argued that the rules provide...

Now, as then, one development that often follows modern scandal is the enactment of rules to combat the evil that is assumed to have caused to it. Take corporate scandals. Sokaiya scandals in Japan led to increased penalties for payments to gangsters. A string of corporate scandals that included the fall of Yamaichi Securities led to an American- style corporate governance option in the Commercial Code. In the United States, WorldCom and Enron led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, arguably the most thorough securities law revisions since the New Deal. This book has argued that the rules provide helpful guideposts for understanding scandals that might otherwise seem arbitrary and contradictory. Among the rules that particularly matter in illuminating how Japanese scandal differs from American are the Japanese preference for private ordering by groups; the smaller role of courts, judges, lawyers, and other formal institutions; divided media institutions; defamation law and other rules of privacy and honor; and muddy rules relating to sex and gender.