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Evocative and stimulating, engaging and timely, this small volume makes sense of the complicated and reciprocal relationship between law and culture. It starts with various definitions of law and the factors that anthropologists consider when they compare legal systems. Next, the experiences of exemplary researchers throughout history and some of the methods they used in their discoveries are discussed. Readers learn how to employ the comparative method and build a typology based on the source of a particular law by putting the world’s legal system into one of three categories: Western law, religious law, and traditional law. The book also tackles important issues such as formal law versus informal law, using law to legitimize power, and clashing values within a single legal system. Examples from fieldwork experiences and historical events offer readers a chance to see how a method has been applied or a concept developed—as well as how law and culture are intertwined in the real world.
Divided into three parts, this book examines the relationship between law and culture from various perspectives, both theoretical and empirical. Part I outlines the framework for further considerations and includes new, innovative conceptualizations of two ideas that are essential to the topic of law and culture: legal culture and customary law. Both of these reappear later in the more empirically oriented chapters of Parts II and III. Part II includes chapters on the relationships between law, customs, and culture, drawing heavily on the tradition and achievements of the anthropology of law and touching on important problems of multiculturalism, legal pluralism, and cultural defense. It focuses on the more intangible meaning of culture, while Part III addresses its more material, tangible aspects and the issue of cultural production, as well as its intersection with law.
This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.
Law | Book | Culture in the Middle Ages takes a detailed view on the role of manuscripts and the written word in legal cultures, spanning the medieval period across western and central Europe.
Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture, Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the facts that are adduced in a legal forum connect to the ways in which facts are constructed in other areas of everyday life, how the processes of legal decision-making partake of the logic by which the culture as a whole is put together, and how courts, mediators, or social pressures fashion a sense of the world as consistent with common sense and social identity. While the book explores issues comparatively, in each instance it relates them to contemporary Western experience. The development of the jury and Continental legal proceedings thus becomes a story of the development of Western ideas of the person and time; African mediation techniques become tests for the style and success of similar efforts in America and Europe; the assertion that one's culture should be considered as an excuse for a crime becomes a challenge to the relation of cultural norms and cultural diversity. Throughout the book, the reader is invited to approach law afresh, as a realm that is integral to every culture and as a window into the nature of culture itself.
This work explores the situating of law and crime within the vast range and scope of contemporary media forms. Sheila Brown shows how crime and the law, or our understanding of them, are produced, reproduced, disturbed, and challenged in and through media culture.
This volume surveys 150 law books of fundamental importance in the history of Western legal literature and culture. The entries are organized in three sections: the first dealing with the transitional period of fifteenth-century editions of medieval authorities, the second spanning the early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the third focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors are scholars from all over the world. Each ‘old book’ is analyzed by a recognized specialist in the specific field of interest. Individual entries give a short biography of the author and discuss the significance of the works in the time and setting of their publication, and in their broader influence on the development of law worldwide. Introductory essays explore the development of Western legal traditions, especially the influence of the English common law, and of Roman and canon law on legal writers, and the borrowings and interaction between them. The book goes beyond the study of institutions and traditions of individual countries to chart a broader perspective on the transmission of legal concepts across legal, political, and geographical boundaries. Examining the branches of this genealogical tree of books makes clear their pervasive influence on modern legal systems, including attempts at rationalizing custom or creating new hybrid systems by transplanting Western legal concepts into other jurisdictions.
Law as Culture is a beguilingly accessible, lively and engaging introduction to the law and to legal skills, complete with innovative skills exercises and even some cartoons. It gives the reader a framework for subsequent legal study and for professional life by demystifying the language and culture of the law and by building legal skills. The Extracts, Preface to the 2nd edn and Skills Inventory (below, link above), clearly outline the many strengths of this edition. The book shows how law students are socialised into professional legal culture, and encourages independent thought. It highlights the ways in which law reflects social values and priorities, the place of law as one among many systems of social organisation and problem-solving, and the rise of lawyers as a subculture. This edition has been extensively revised to take account of developments in law such as the results of the 1999 Referendum on the Republic, the debates about a Bill of Rights for Australia, and changes to legal professional practice. The jurisdictional reach has been extended to look at cases and legislation from all Australian States. Black/White relations has been introduced as a recurring theme - materials on Aboriginal Reconciliation, the Wik judgment and the legal and political debate over the Stolen Generations give continuity and perspective. Law as Culture includes clear and accessible accounts of key jurisprudential issues and an extended introduction which sets out the pedagogical assumptions. There are cases and legislation from all Australian States, thorough referencing, and an annotated list of Further Reading in each chapter.
This book assembles essays on legal sociology and legal history by an international group of distinguished scholars. All of them have been influenced by the eminent and prolific legal historian, legal sociologist and scholar of comparative law, Lawrence M. Friedman. Not just a Festschrift of essays by colleagues and disciples, this volume presents a sustained examination and application of Friedman's ideas and methods. Together, the essays in this volume show the powerful ripple effects of Friedman's work on American and comparative legal sociology, American and comparative legal history and the general sociology of law and legal change.
Communities and Law looks at minorities, or nonruling communities, and their identity practices under state domination in the midst of globalization. It examines six sociopolitical dimensions of community--nationality, social stratification, gender, religion, ethnicity, and legal consciousness--within the communitarian context and through their respective legal cultures. Gad Barzilai addresses such questions as: What is a communal legal culture, and what is its relevance for relations between state and society in the midst of globalization? How do nonliberal communal legal cultures interact with transnational American-led liberalism? Is current liberalism, with its emphasis on individual rights, litigation, and adjudication, sufficient to protect pluralism and multiculturalism? Why should democracies encourage the collective rights of nonruling communities and protect nonliberal communal cultures in principle and in practice? He looks at Arab-Palestinians, feminists, and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel as examples of the types of communities discussed. Communities and Law contributes to our understanding of the severe tensions between democracies, on the one hand, and the challenge of their minority communities, on the other, and suggests a path toward resolving the resulting critical issues. Gad Barzilai is Professor of Political Science and Law and Co-Director of the Law, Politics and Society Program, Department of Political Science, Tel Aviv University.