Pursuing our goal of analyzing some aspects of advanced societies integrated not by the similarities but by the differences, we reached to a certain new world of sociology of law which should be developed for understanding the current societies undergoing structural changes, as individuals whose activities are grouped into different institutions specializing in their respective functions. Individuals relate to one another on the basis of the complementary differences mutually inter-dependent on one another. We may, therefore understand the importance of pre-law emotions bonding people into communities.
We will use 'solidarity' as the term symbolizing solid functions of integrating or grouping individuals into different institutions compared with the term 'communal' or 'communality' symbolizing the image of the dubious and elusive ideals by the scientists of sociology of law who hope to expand the ideals which create private and voluntary mutual help among people.
The nature of modern law can be seen most clearly when contrasted with the process of social ordering in traditional Japanese society. One unitary and superior social entity was believed to replace the pre-modern village or tribe in social control. These Weberian concept of modern law thinking often argues that the rest of the world would repeat the western experience of simultaneous legal and socio-economic development. The question is how to allow development to happen without falling into the trap of a mere laissez faire liberalism. Law's function is to discover through dialogue the potentialities of law as a resource to deal with shared grievances.
Laws seem to be undergoing a process of both destructing and restructuring in our developed societies in which multiple potentialities of our human communality are well developed and balanced as open communality as opposed to the closed communality found in Japan. In Japan minorities are required to tolerate the intolerance of majority of people. This requirement is enforced not only by informal community pressure, but also by governmental authorities, judiciary, employers, and all other conceivable agents of social control. Therefore critical legal studies are cited to stress the hegemonic power of legal rights and formal judicial systems to limit the way people can deal with their problems and fully express their own perspectives. Postmodernism is cited to argue that grand narratives or theories lost their effectivism. In the transformation of society and the activist lawyers who impose their own grand narratives on their clients are exerting their hegemonic power like that of legal rights and formal judicial system. Communalism is cited to argue for the need of basing our legal system on people's natural sense of morality.
The idea of community rejected in the literature of sociology of law is usually that of a comprehensive, all embracing or very extensive system of shared values. To consider conditions under which community could be a basis of modern law, it is necessary to specify more clearly what kind of community is being sought.
The purpose of our projects is to analyze the transformation of Japanese society of today and to set up new sociology of law which should be formulated through the discussion among the scholars of this association. Viewed from the perspective of a sociology of law, increasing state intervention in both welfare and economic affairs, and the consequent erosion of the liberal separation between state and civil society, gradually undermine the relative generality and the autonomy that distinguish the legal order, and what is follow this is to make it impossible to maintain an objective and justified solution. The solution of law, which seemed to contain the problem of the unjustified exercise of the power, is no longer seen as doing so. Where we do go from here and what are the possibilities of any alternative conception?.
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