Community Conflicts and Their Legal Processing

Abstract

In the course of many community conflicts which occurred in Kyoto City over the construction of condominium buildings during the period of so-called bubble economy, local residents used various strategies, including illegal as well as legal ones and norm-generating as well as norm-invoking ones, against construction companies. Those local residents think that law is merely one of instruments available for realizing their purposes. We can see the emergence of postmodern legel consciousness in such an attitude toward law. We can also argue that their strategic use or nonuse of law differentiates the legal order into many legal orders dependent upon various situational factors. The differentiation of the legal order is not a new phenomenon, however, because law always has to be interpreted in a particular situation to which it is to be applied and therefore the meaning of law and order according to it are inevitably dependent upon situational factors even though people believe in the universal legal order.