Legal Culture

Written for an encyclopedia on European private law, this briefarticle addresses the term legal culture, the relation between law andculture, the relevance of legal culture, legal culture in the nationaland European context, and criticism of the concept

Legal paternalism and the identity of Polish legal culture

The project was financed by National Science Centre Poland (decision no. DEC-2012/05/B/HS5/01111)

Review of Law in America: A Short History, by Lawrence M. Friedman

[Excerpt] Lawrence M. Friedman’s Law in America: A Short History is a fascinating survey of the history of the American legal system. The book is written for both the legal professional and those interested in American legal history. Professor Friedman best summed up the book’s tenor by saying “we cannot understand American law without understanding American legal culture.” He then proceeds to explain the legal culture during three periods in our nation’s history and how the legal system was shaped by those times

Critical Thinking and Legal Culture

We often lack clear procedures for assessing statements and arguments advanced in everyday conversations, political campaigns, advertisements, and the other multifarious uses to which ordinary language can be put. Critical thinking is a method for evaluating arguments couched in ordinary, non-formal language. Legal education should foster this argumentative skill as an ability to assess the open-end variety of arguments that may arise in legal disputes. I will argue that the ability of critical thinking helps lawyers to thrive even in legal cultures that are hostile to critical thinking. There is, therefore, a happy harmony between professional and moral reasons to teach critical thinking at law schools: it promotes epistemic as well as instrumental rationality.critical thinking, ability, argumentation, ordinary language, epistemic rationality

Adversarialism in Italy: Using the concept of legal culture to understand resistance to legal modifications and its consequences

Based on the author’s empirical study on Italian prosecutors, this article uses legal culture to analyze the reasons why prosecutors are resisting certain legal modifications. In so doing, this paper tries to offer a fresh perspective over (comparative) global issues, such as: the meaning of inquisitorial and adversarial in modern criminal justice systems, the impact of legal transplants and legal translations and the centrality of prosecutors’ powers in contemporary criminal justice systems. In particular, the analysis of legal culture in a comparative perspective can stretch our imagination about what is the true extent of prosecutors’ powers, and how these can be related and balanced against the defendant’s rights

Legal Culture Blindness and Canadian Indian Law

This paper explores the special problems that specialists in federal Indian law in the United States face when they attempt to understand the legal position of indigenous peoples in Canada, make comparisons and offer assistance and advice. Although the roots of Canadian Indian law in British Crown policy are similar to those of the United States, the evolution of United States and Canadian Indian law occurred in patterns which were as distinctly different as has been the evolution of each country. Although some comparisons can be made between the two patterns of legal development, especially in the realm of policy changes directed at indigenous populations, the core of each legal relationship is very different, especially as it relates to federalism, the constitutional process and role of the courts, and public land issues. Therefore, while models of Indian legal achievements in one country are often used to induce governmental change in the other, especially in Alaska among the United States and in Canada, generally, advocates and United States specialists must exercise extreme caution to avoid legal culture blindness based on a lack of appreciation of the very different historical development of each nation.Abstract / Preface / Roadblocks to Mutual Understanding / Baseline Similarities / History / Government / Aboriginal Title / Tribal Self-Government / Land Claims / Evaluation of Comparisons – Which Comparisons? / Footnotes / Bibliograph

Belgian social law and its journals: a reflected history

Through the analysis of the emergence of contemporary social law, Bruno Debaenst stresses the multiple links resulting from the creation of a new field in law and its specialized journals. These milestones underline how actors interact to define and manage an autonomous space in the legal culture in the making. Progressively, the two founding pillars of social law, labour law and social security law emancipated. Thus, journals follow a similar path to become distinct and specialized. Since the end of the nineteenth century, as the author lists the multiple titles, legal practitioners, lawyers and magistrates animate the journals until the Second World War. With the integration of social law in the legal curriculum, these journals received attention of Liège, Louvain and Brussels universities professors. In a way, this analysis documents how legal journals contribute to the definition of legal culture, beyond reflecting it

Language and Culture in International Legal Communication

In the contemporary business world, partners belonging to different nations, and hence different cultures, conduct business operations in either the language of one of the parties involved or in a third, neutral language, serving as lingua franca. Thus, language skills, as an essential component of the communicative competence, imply a certain extent of implicit or explicit translating and interpreting. The functionalist approaches in translation science, and most of all the Skopos theory by J. H. Vermeer, view translation as an intercultural transfer, which inevitably entails taking into account intercultural differences. As intercultural business communication is directly affected by the legal systems of the cultures involved, the communicating parties need to be acquainted with both the source and target legal systems. This is especially the case with English, as the Anglo-American legal system, based essentially on common law, differs substantially from continental law, to which most of the European countries belong. English as the world’s most commonly used lingua franca will have to be adapted to its new function by adopting terms and concepts from other cultures and, within the EU, take into consideration the existing discrepancies between the continental and the Anglo-American legal systems. In this paper, cases of non-equivalence regarding legal terms are illustrated with examples from company law. In conclusion, some linguistic and cultural implications of the use of English as lingua franca, as well as their impact on teaching and learning practices are presented.translation, lingua franca, Skopos, cultural embeddedness

Law’s empire : English legal cultures at home and abroad [Review Article]

The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians’ understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock’s classic study. The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law’s pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law’s empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law