Legal Culture (legal + culture)

Distribution by Scientific Domains


Selected Abstracts


Communications Revolutions and Legal Culture: An Elusive Relationship

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 3 2002
Richard J. Ross
First page of article [source]


Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880,1960 , By Stephen Robertson

THE HISTORIAN, Issue 2 2007
Randolph E. Bergstrom
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Explorations in Legal Cultures.

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 1 2009
By Fred Bruinsma, David Nelken
No abstract is available for this article. [source]


Culture and Mind: Their Fruitful Incommensurability

ETHOS, Issue 1 2008
Jerome Bruner
I focus on institutions as means for canonizing the ordinary, on narrative as a mode of positioning the extraordinary vis-à-vis mundane expectations, and on agency, each of which entails intersections of mind and culture. Recent encounters with U.S. legal culture provide a ground for illustrating these intertwining relations of subjects and their cultural milieux. [culture, mind, law, institutions, selectivity] [source]


A European Legal Method?

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 1 2009
On European Private Law, Scientific Method
This article examines the relationship between European private law and scientific method. It argues that a European legal method is a good idea. Not primarily because it will make European private law scholarship look more scientific, but because a debate on the method of a normative science necessarily has to be a debate on its normative assumptions. In other words, a debate on a European legal method will have much in common with the much desired debate on social justice in European law. Moreover, it submits that, at least after the adoption of the Common Frame of Reference by the European institutions, European contract law can be regarded as a developing multi-level system that can be studied from the inside. Finally, it concludes that the Europeanisation of private law is gradually blurring the dividing line between the internal and external perspectives, with their respective appropriate methods, in two mutually reinforcing ways. First, in the developing multi-level system it is unclear where the external borders of the system lie, in particular the borders between Community law and national law. Second, because of the less formal legal culture the (formerly) external perspectives, such as the economic perspective, have easier access and play an increasing role as policy considerations. [source]


State, Citizen, and Character in French Criminal Process

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2006
Stewart Field
This paper charts some major differences in the way in which evidence of the defendant's character is treated in France when compared with practice in England and Wales. Such evidence is more pervasive and visible (especially in the most serious cases) and its relevance is more broadly defined. Further, its presentation is shaped by a developed and positive conception of the French citizen. In part, these differences may be explained by differences in procedural tradition: the unitary trial structure in France, the dominance of fact,finding by the professional judiciary, and the rejection of general exclusionary rules of evidence. But a full explanation requires French legal culture to be understood in the context of French political culture. This reveals a very different conception of relations between state and citizen to that of Anglo-Saxon liberalism. As a result the legitimacy of trial is seen in terms of the rehabilitation of the accused as a citizen of the state rather than simply the punishment of a particular infraction. [source]


The Battle over Brown's Legitimacy

JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY, Issue 1 2003
Jeffrey D. Hockett
Constitutional scholars have given few Supreme Court rulings the attention that they have lavished upon the celebrated decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet the literature of public law is surprisingly unedifying with regard to the process by which the desegregation decision achieved iconic status in American legal culture. Scholarly inattentiveness to the history of Brown's reputation is startling, given that southern politicians were not the only persons in 1954 to characterize the decision as a manifest instance of judicial legislation. Even persons sympathetic to desegregation conceded that the Justices had circumvented traditional legal constraints in rendering Brown. In the years immediately following the ruling, some scholars appealed to the notion of a "living Constitution" to defend Brown against charges that it conflicted with the original understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment and with the "separate but equal" doctrine that the Court had established in Plessy v. Ferguson. But critics, some of whom even accepted the concept of the "living Constitution," also challenged the Court's reading of social fact,that is, its claims regarding the inherent inequality of segregated schools,which supposedly justified judicial recognition of a right that conflicted with precedent and with the intentions of the Framers of the Equal Protection Clause. [source]


The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2001
Christopher Tomlins
This essay investigates the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland, concentrating on the charters and letters patent that proponents of western planning secured over the course of the century. The elaborated legalities of chartering should be understood as a technology of planning and design. Charters allowed projectors both to justify their pursuit of particular territorial claims and to establish, with some precision, the conceptions of the appropriate, familiar, desired order of things and people that would be imposed onto uncharted social and physical circumstance. The structures of authoritative sociolegal order planned by projectors encountered others implicit in the migrations of actual settlers. Investigating settlers'disagreement with and departure from projectors'designs, the essay discards common explanations,that these were inevitable corrections brought about by the intrusion of local environmental realities on English projectors'fantasies, or the realization of an implicit evolutionary logic of political development, or of legal reception. It argues that disagreements were more often the result of a collision of distinct English legal cultures brought, by migration, into an unavoidable proximity. The essay counterposes the paradigm of "colonization" to both "common law reception" and "bottom-up localism" analyses of the formation of early American legal culture. It proposes that "colonization" also resolves the discontinuity between early (colonial) and later (U.S.) American history. [source]


Confessions and Criminal Case Disposition in China

LAW & SOCIETY REVIEW, Issue 3 2003
Hong Lu
This research examines confessions and criminal case disposition in China. It describes how wider economic reforms in China and subsequent changes in its legal system may have affected the nature and consequence of criminal confessions. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of a sample of 1,009 criminal court cases reveal that the majority of offenders confessed to their crime and that confession is associated with less severe punishments (e.g., lower risks for imprisonment, shorter sentences). Changes in the nature of confession and its impact on criminal court practices are also examined before and after legal reforms in the mid-1990s. These context-specific findings are then discussed in terms of their implications for understanding the interrelationships between legal structure, legal culture, and case disposition in communitarian-based societies. [source]


The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2001
Christopher Tomlins
This essay investigates the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland, concentrating on the charters and letters patent that proponents of western planning secured over the course of the century. The elaborated legalities of chartering should be understood as a technology of planning and design. Charters allowed projectors both to justify their pursuit of particular territorial claims and to establish, with some precision, the conceptions of the appropriate, familiar, desired order of things and people that would be imposed onto uncharted social and physical circumstance. The structures of authoritative sociolegal order planned by projectors encountered others implicit in the migrations of actual settlers. Investigating settlers'disagreement with and departure from projectors'designs, the essay discards common explanations,that these were inevitable corrections brought about by the intrusion of local environmental realities on English projectors'fantasies, or the realization of an implicit evolutionary logic of political development, or of legal reception. It argues that disagreements were more often the result of a collision of distinct English legal cultures brought, by migration, into an unavoidable proximity. The essay counterposes the paradigm of "colonization" to both "common law reception" and "bottom-up localism" analyses of the formation of early American legal culture. It proposes that "colonization" also resolves the discontinuity between early (colonial) and later (U.S.) American history. [source]