Legal advice as a mode of conflict resolution

an ethnomethodological respecification

Abstract

The scheme of providing legal advice to the public is one of the most popular places for ordinary Japanese to come in touch with formal legal system. Based on the technique of ethnomethodological conversation analysis, the paper tries to describe how the advice-seekers tell their troubles and how the lawyer-advisers find adequate advice for the troubles in citizens' stories. The data and analysis reveals that, in the very process of applying formal and universalistic rules of law, both the lawyers and the lay persons try to recover the non-legal and local details of the case.