Hot Springs Research Institute of Kanagawa Prefecture
21st Century New Jurisprudence A System of Institutional Evolution Chapter I: The Essence of Law and the Definition of True Jurisprudence Chapter II: Foundations of Jurisprudence — The Co-Evolutionary Theory of Procedural and Substantive Justice Chapter III: Mechanisms for Integrating Jurisprudence with Social Governance Chapter IV: How Legal Rules Transform the National Economy Chapter V: Unifying the Art of Reform with Legal Provisions This system proposes that law is fundamentally a teleological order whose legitimacy derives not from procedural completeness but from its capacity to realize substantive justice — the protection of life, liberty, and human flourishing. It diagnoses contemporary institutions through the "diagnosis-treatment-construction" triad, identifying structural violence embedded in healthcare monopolies, cryptocurrency markets, and sports governance as pathologies that invert means into ends. Procedural justice, left uncoupled from substantive purpose, self-accelerates into illegitimacy through cumulative distortion, feedback failure, and legitimacy erosion — a pattern confirmed by comparative history from Qin to Rome to modern America. The remedy is institutional self-calibration: sunset review, independent fact-finding, audit-based compensation, and rapid correction channels that keep law tethered to its teleological anchor. Reform proceeds through a four-phase roadmap balancing synchronicity (preventing regulatory arbitrage) with sequential constraint (avoiding systemic overload), guided by 31 diagnostic conditions that tie every provision to a specific pathology and cure. The underlying logic unifies healthcare's five therapeutic mechanisms, cryptocurrency's six-dimensional governance framework, and cross-border regulatory alignment under the "shared loss principle" — ensuring risk-creators bear costs, not society. Law's ultimate aim is not to protect capital's freedom but to expand individuals' substantive freedom, making the economy serve comprehensive human development. In an era of AI adjudication, digital assets, and ecological crisis, this jurisprudence demonstrates that institutional evolution — the continuous rebuilding of the causal chain between rules and their purposes — is the only reliable path to steering civilization toward life, liberty, and prosperity.
Abstract With rapid urbanization and expanding infrastructure, construction contract disputes are increasing in volume and complexity, challenging traditional adjudication. This study proposes a domain-specific legal artificial intelligence (AI) system for construction contract disputes via hybrid knowledge integration based on the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) paradigm, integrating five core legal texts and 500 adjudication cases within a dual-engine architecture. The knowledge base encodes legal concepts, relations, and rules to enable structured semantic inference. The DeepSeek-R1 reasoning engine analyzes case facts and legal logic via constrained generation, while the BGE-M3 retrieval module matches legal provisions and precedents using multivector indexing. A tripartite evaluation framework—semantic similarity, legal provision citation accuracy, and issue prediction F1 score—validates system performance. The hybrid knowledge model outperforms single-source models, achieving scores of 0.736, 0.952, and 0.937, respectively, while significantly reducing judicial document generation time. This study offers a theoretical and empirical basis for legal AI in Chinese construction disputes, demonstrating how integrating diverse legal knowledge enhances intelligent judicial assistance within China’s jurisdiction. It also provides a scalable methodological reference for the advancement of smart justice, with explicit recognition of its current jurisdictional limitations.
Electoral conflicts continue to pose a danger to the consolidation of democracy in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region. Efforts to resolve conflicts is often criticised as the use of conventional dispute resolution procedures are proving to be cumbersome, expensive, opaque and logistically challenging, all of which erode public confidence in election results. The study seeks to design and validate an integrated e-technology framework that enhances the speed, accessibility and credibility of electoral dispute resolution in SADC by aligning legal reforms with digital tools for filing, evidence management and adjudication. Six SADC member states were purposively selected: Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Mozambique and Mauritius. Selection was based on, firstly, electoral dispute history: all six have experienced post-election litigation 2018-2025, ensuring relevance; secondly, digital variance: South Africa and Mauritius represent high digital readiness per ITU ICT Development Index 2024, while Malawi and Mozambique represent low infrastructure contexts, strengthening transferability; and finally legal diversity in all six. This study used primary data collected through 150 structured surveys of IT experts and officials across the six countries, 75 key informant interviews (KIIs) with judges and national elections commissions (NECs)/electoral management bodies (EMBs) legal officers. Secondary data included electoral court judgments 2018-2025, observer reports, SADC Principles and Guidelines Governing Democratic Elections 2021 and national electoral acts to map legal gaps. The results also show that an integrated e-technology framework can minimise the cost of pursuing electoral justice by 42% on average, improve access for rural litigants by enabling mobile filing, promote transparency through real-time case tracking and reduce median case resolution time from 112 days to 38 days in pilot simulations. The proposed framework integrates four interlocking components, namely blockchain[1]based evidence preservation, e-filing and case management portals, virtual hearings, online mediation platforms, and open data dashboards. The study concludes that while digitalising electoral fairness in SADC is both essential and feasible, institutional and political shortcomings cannot be addressed by technology alone.