Why are we concerned with post-modernity? There are three major concerns. Firstly, a normative concern. The "modern" has been a norm in legal order, like liberty and freedom, or separation of law from politics etc. However, many of us feel the law what we see today does not fit neatly with this model. So a new model is being searched. Secondly, the concern for legalization. When the law plays a small role and people resort to it only in extraordinary circumstances, it is not defficult to maintain the integrity of the law in its pure form. However, as the domain of the law expands and intersects with our social world, we must find a new way to deal with the law. Thirdly, the diagnosis of the contemporary Japan. Has Japan achieved the modern sooiety in its fuller sense? Many people have an ambivalent view on this. They resent to the idea that we keep looking upon the West as a model, but still admit that there remain many irrational things in Japan.
To understand the modern/postmodern legal order, there are two major approaches: the transformation of the modern, and the fiction of the modern. The former approach, which implicitly assumes the modern as a pinnacle of the human society, treats the contemporary as the modern being transformed. This is a familiar scheme in legal analysis like formal-rational law of the modern being lost to the informal/substantive-rational law. The latter approach, I presume to be more interesting, considers the modern simply as our construction. The modern society as historically existed differs from what we depict as the modern society. This discrepancy precipitates our inquiry into the uniquely modern consciouness which lies behind its construction. The modern sceptics also reveals the modern legal order as being foundationless, relative to the belief system then prevaling. Out of the two basic elements of our social existence, namely separateness/connectedness the modern law is strongly biased to the former, which explains the predicament of the liberal law. All these analyses enrich our understanding of the legal order we have today.
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