In these essays, contributors seek to understand how the law works in its cultural and social contexts by focusing specifically on the urban experience and, to a large extent, on urban archives. Contributions deal with the understanding of legal experts of the late Middle Ages and early modern periods, as well as users of courts and legal services, languages and legal cases, and legal activities that take place inside and outside official legal forums. This volume explores the expectations of people at different levels of status regarding the application of the law, what perceptions of justice and authority existed among different groups, and what their knowledge of the law and the legal process was. By examining how different aspects of legal culture have been recorded in writing, contributors show how this writing itself has become an integral part of a legal culture. Experts from the 15 legal cultures contained in the volume were invited to structure the presentation of their native legal culture according to the legal model presented above. We started our project with a limited number of legal cultures in the first edition of the book, which was published in 2017 (Germany, Austria, France, England and Wales, Scotland, Finland and Estonia). In the second edition, we managed to broaden the spectrum of cultures to include cultures such as China, the United States, Australia, Italy, Belgium, Norway, Romania and Poland. It is important to emphasize that the legal cultural approach chosen in this book is not determined by traditional taxonomies or classifications. For the comparison of legal cultures, the typology of legal traditions or legal families has proved to be inappropriate or even an obstacle. As a result, we have not focused on certain representatives of the common law and civil law system such as Germany, France, England and the United States.
Rather, our goal is to continually broaden the cultural spectrum and provide the reader with examples and living sources from different legal cultures around the world. In the longer term, we want to map the legal cultures of the world according to the framework defined in the first four chapters of the book. In other words, this book is an important step on the way, but not the end of our journey. We hope that the book will help both students and practicing lawyers as well as policy makers to better understand the goals and methods of contextual comparative research based on a legal culture perspective. The goal of Comparing Legal Cultures is to improve the reader`s understanding of certain legal cultures, including their historical roots and cultural roots. In addition, the aim is to enable the reader to carry out a comparative analysis based on a deeper and more differentiated holistic understanding of the legal cultures concerned. In addition, it provides general guidelines for making a comparison based on the information provided in the chapters on selected legal cultures. We have developed a seven-step model organized into a hermeneutic circle that explains step by step how to proceed in the field of comparative law. The book can therefore be seen as a starting point and tool for all kinds of comparatists, whether the reader wants to make comparisons at the micro or macro level or adopt a positivist, socio-legal, critical or pluralistic approach to the law.
Introductory course for exchange students: Exploring Norwegian legal culture. The course is not compulsory, but a good preparation for this course, as it is based on the same operationalized concept of legal culture as JUS290-2-A. Legal cultures have a lot in common with paella. It is common knowledge that paella is one of the most famous dishes of Spanish cuisine. Nevertheless, there are many variations of the dish, from the more traditional Valencian (Paella valenciana) to the seafood paella (Paella de marisco) to the mixed paella (Paella mixta). The word paella refers to a traditional flat pan in which the dish is cooked over an open fire, and can therefore be translated as a “frying pan”. Although the ingredients used to cook the dish vary greatly depending on local customs and traditions, some basic elements are more or less common to all versions of paella. This applies to both the cooking method and some standard ingredients such as the round grain pan, broth and some proteins. Defining these common elements as Tertium comparationis allows us to compare variations in paella and categorize and classify paella based on the origin, content, and cooking methods of the versions. The same applies to a comparison of legal cultures. But what are the specific elements that determine the legal culture? Or, to put it another way, can we identify universal elements of legal cultures that allow us to make a meaningful comparison? credit www.uib.no/en/rg/legalcultureImage: Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash The legal cultural approach developed in Bergen has had an impact on the teaching of comparative law in almost all Norwegian institutions that offer a law degree.
In addition, it has been used in comparative law courses in several counties in addition to Norway (Scotland, Estonia, Poland, Switzerland, Spain and China).
