Instantiation an inner class using reflection

Question

I want to instantiate an inner class using the Class.newInstance() method called within the Outer class constructor:
public Outer
public Outer()
Inner.class.newInstance();
private Class Inner { }
When I try it, however, I get an InstantiationException.
Is there some way to do this?
Thanks for the help.
Scott

Answer 1

Here is a consolidation of what everyone posted and it does appear to work. In one of your post you used the getDeclaredConstructors() method and said it was less than ideal; I am not sure what you meant but I suspect it was the hard coded array reference. Anyhow I used the getDeclaredConstructor() method which appears to get non-public constructors also and is basically the same as using the getConstructor() method.
import java.lang.reflect.*;
public class Test35 {
    static public void main(String[] args) {
        Test35 t35 = new Test35();
        t35.testIt();
    private class Inner {
        public String toString() {
            return "Hear I am";
    public void testIt() {
        try {
            Constructor con = Inner.class.getDeclaredConstructor(new Class[] {Test35.class});
            Inner in = (Inner)con.newInstance(new Object[] {this});
            System.out.println(in);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();