South Korea and Japan have long been treated as textbook cases of “nonlegalistic” governance. Bureaucrats relied heavily on informal guidance and social pressure, courts remained at some distance from policymaking, and disputes were often settled through negotiation rather than litigation. Celeste Arrington’s From Manners to Rules traces a gradual but consequential departure from that pattern. In both countries, regulation has become more formal, detailed, and enforceable, while channels for citizen participation have also become more proceduralized. The book asks not only why this shift took place in societies so often associated with administrative discretion, but also why legalism has developed differently in two countries with otherwise comparable postwar legal and political institutions.

Arrington’s answer shifts attention away from the elite-centered and structural explanations that dominate much of the literature on judicialization. Interbranch conflict, fragmented authority, and international legal pressure all matter, but they do not by themselves explain the timing or form of legal change. The book instead places activists and lawyers at the center of the story. They appear not as passive beneficiaries of institutional openings but as actors who help create those openings. Arrington identifies five mechanisms through which they do so. They frame social problems as rights violations requiring binding remedies, broaden coalitions to gain credibility and access, absorb the costs of policy research, use litigation to expose weaknesses in existing rules, and mobilize international treaty-reporting processes to bring external scrutiny to domestic practice. None of these mechanisms are unfamiliar on their own. What the book shows, more convincingly, is how they reinforce one another over time and begin to alter a country’s wider regulatory style rather than only a single policy outcome.

The empirical core of the book is a paired comparison of disability rights and tobacco control reform in South Korea and Japan, based on 120 interviews and extensive documentary research. The disability chapters reveal particularly clearly how similar advocacy strategies could produce different results depending on the institutional channels available. Korean disability organizations coordinated through a unified advocacy coalition, secured representation on the task force that drafted antidiscrimination legislation, and later used the resulting law to challenge exemptions affecting small businesses and intercity transit. Japanese activists pursued a different route. Without an equivalent public interest law infrastructure, they gained representation on the Democratic Party of Japan’s disability policy reform council between 2009 and 2012 and later used the approaching 2020 Tokyo Olympics to press for accessibility commitments. Arrington’s discussion of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster is especially striking. Disabled residents died in disproportionate numbers because many schools serving as emergency shelters were not legally required to be accessible, and advocates subsequently used that evidence to argue for binding standards rather than voluntary guidance.

The tobacco chapters work well as a negative comparison. Advocates secured stronger rules on nonsmoking environments in both countries but made little progress on manufacturer liability. The reasons for failure are as revealing as the successes in disability rights. In Japan, the Ministry of Finance’s partial ownership of Japan Tobacco and the Liberal Democratic Party’s longstanding ties to producers and retailers gave the industry durable political protection. In both countries, demanding evidentiary standards and the absence of discovery procedures weakened litigation as a strategy. Including a policy area in which legalism largely failed to take hold improves the book’s comparative design. Arrington is not simply collecting successful examples of bottom-up reform. She is also identifying the conditions under which legalistic change is more likely, including coalition breadth, access to institutions, and the organizational strength of opponents. Tobacco illustrates the last of these especially well: the industry’s durable political protection, described above, shows how organized opposition can blunt legalistic reform despite sustained advocacy.

The comparative claim that follows is more interesting than a simple story of Korea moving faster than Japan. Arrington argues that the two countries have developed different forms of legalism. Korean reforms tend to be more formal and to provide stronger enforcement mechanisms, yet implementation often falls short of the law’s promises, leaving civil society groups to monitor compliance and press for follow-through. Japanese reforms generally appear weaker on paper. They rely more heavily on procedural participation and voluntary compliance, but they are often implemented more consistently in practice. The distinction between formality and participation gives the comparison much of its analytical force. It also helps explain why stronger law on the books does not always produce stronger change in practice.

The book’s main limitation follows from its greatest strength. By placing activists and lawyers at the center of the explanation, Arrington necessarily tells us less about the calculations of bureaucrats and legislators who decide whether to accommodate social pressure, redirect it, or absorb it without conceding much. The five mechanisms are shown persuasively to contribute to legalistic reform. It is less clear, however, how elite receptivity operates within the book’s explanation of cross-national variation. This matters because some of the most important differences between Korea and Japan appear to stem from unequal access to policymaking institutions rather than from differences in the intensity of mobilization itself. The comparison therefore leaves readers with a clearer sense of the role that differences in institutional access played in the two cases than of how elite receptivity itself influenced the reform process. A fuller discussion of how officials interpreted and responded to advocacy would have clarified the relationship between these two elements and strengthened the book’s explanatory argument.

That reservation does not weaken the book’s central achievement. Arrington shows how activists and lawyers can reshape regulatory style without losing sight of the institutional terrain within which they operate. In doing so, she offers a comparative account of judicialization that moves beyond both cultural explanations of East Asian legal exceptionalism and top-down accounts in which legal change is something elites simply impose on society. Even readers who remain unconvinced that activists should occupy quite as central a place in the explanation will find the comparative evidence difficult to dismiss. The book’s lasting contribution lies in reframing legalism as an outcome of strategic interaction rather than as a straightforward product of institutional structure. That makes From Manners to Rules a useful point of reference for future work on law, social movements, and governance in East Asia.