The multi-layered diversification of public spheres and the reconstruction of legal system

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Our research aimed to carry out the following three tasks : (1) to identify new challenges to sodal order-formation presented by the multi-layered diversification of public spheres in the contemporary world ; (2) to construct a higher-order principle that can respect the autonomy of each of the diverse public spheres and promote their cooperation based on a functional complementarity ; and (3) to reconstruct the basic categories of legal philosophy that can shape the basic structure of legal system on a basis of such higher-order public principle. Our results are the following :(1) We have shown that the governmental control based on the conventional private/public dichotomy has lost its efficacy m the context of a variety of emerging social phenomena : gender-discrimination and domestic violence, the use of market in supplying the kind of "public goods" that fit the ordinary people's needs of life, the division of labor between the public and private in health insurance, the multicult … More ural conflict about the demarcation of the public and private and the ambivalent relationships between the digital empowerment and individual freedom and privacy.(2) We have shown that the conventional models of the public (the spherical model, the agent-centered model and the procedural model) are inadequate to meet the challenges of multi-layered diversification of public spheres. As a more promising alternative, we presented a reason-oriented model of the public that requires us to give public justification open to the heterogenic perspectives of the others on a basis of the universalistic concept of justice as combined with the test of reversibility.(3) We have shown that the dominant schools of legal philosophy such as liberalism, communitarianism, republicanism and law and economics' are all pressed to reshape their basic concepts and principles and that the justice-based reason model of the public enables us to overcome the discrimination and repression in the 'private spheres." We have also pointed out that the other-regarding and justice-based model of the public help us to revitalize the market supply of the public goods and reunite the civic virtue and openness to cultural diversity within the framework of liberal rights and principles of constitutional democracy. Less