Exploring Law and Culture

2005-11-14
Exploring Law and Culture

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  • Author: Dorothy H. Bracey
  • Publisher: Waveland Press
  • ISBN: 1478636475
  • Category : Social Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 121

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.

Criminal Law and Cultural Diversity

2014-05-15
Criminal Law and Cultural Diversity

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  • Author: Will Kymlicka
  • Publisher: OUP Oxford
  • ISBN: 0191664308
  • Category : Political Science
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 240

The idea of a cultural defense in criminal law is often ridiculed as "multiculturalism run amok ". To allow someone charged with a crime to say "this is my culture " as an excuse for their action seems to open the door to cultural relativism, to jeopardize the protection of fundamental rights, and to undermine norms of individual responsibility. Many scholars, however, insist that cultural evidence is appropriate, indeed essential, for the fair operation of the criminal law. The criminal law is society's most powerful tool for regulating behaviour, and just for that reason we apply strong safeguards to ensure that criminal sanctions are applied in a fair way. When it comes to individuals, we want our rules for judging responsibility and punishment to track the actual blameworthiness of the specific individual being prosecuted for a specific action in the past. Cultural evidence may help improve our judgements of individual blameworthiness and desert; indeed, cultural evidence might even be necessary if the practice of punishing individuals is to be legitimate and equitable. According to its proponents, the use of cultural evidence when judging individual blameworthiness is a natural extension of the logic of existing criminal law doctrines regarding defences, and of the logic of current philosophical theories of responsibility and agency. This volume brings together scholars of both criminal law and philosophy to rigorously assess these ideas. Each of the chapters addresses a different dimension of the issue, from a range of perspectives, with varying degrees of sympathy or scepticism regarding cultural defences. The result is an important and original contribution to the literature. It explores why cultural diversity raises distinctive challenges in the criminal law context, not found in other domains of the multiculturalism debate, while also exploring how this particular context raises fundamental issues of agency and responsibility that are at the heart of broader debates in legal, social and political philosophy.

Law and Popular Culture

2004
Law and Popular Culture

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  • Author: Michael Asimow
  • Publisher: Peter Lang
  • ISBN: 9780820458151
  • Category : Art
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 308

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.

Between Law and Culture

2001
Between Law and Culture

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  • Author: Lisa C. Bower
  • Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
  • ISBN: 9780816633814
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 372

What happens to legal thought when key terms-society, culture, power, justice, identity-become unsettled? With the boundaries defining sociolegal scholarship undergoing a profound shift, this book explores the intersections of law, culture, and identity. Sexuality, race, sports, and the politics of policing are among the topics the authors take up as they examine how law both reproduces and challenges fundamental notions of order, discipline, and identity. Contributors: Rosemary J. Coombe, U of Toronto; David M. Engel, SUNY, Buffalo; Marjorie Garber, Harvard U; Herman Gray, UC, Santa Cruz; Rona Tamiko Halualani, San Jos State U; David Harvey, CUNY; Deb Henderson; Yuen J. Huo, UCLA; S. Lily Mendoza, U of Denver; Trish Oberweis, American Justice Institute; Paul A. Passavant, Hobart and William Smith Colleges; Lisa E. Sanchez, U of Illinois; Carl F. Stychin, U of Reading; Tom R. Tyler, New York U; Christine A. Yalda.

Law and the Order of Culture

1991-01-01
Law and the Order of Culture

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  • Author: Robert Post
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 9780520073371
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 228

Law and the Order of Culture is an outstanding collection of essays that explores the cultural creation of legal meaning, addressing interpretive processes within the law as well as the social constitution of legal doctrine. Originally published in Representations, these essays are at the center of the "law and literature" movement which exemplifies a burgeoning literature in feminist jurisprudence, critical legal studies, and other work that has focused on law as evidence of cultural orderings. For this edition Robert Post has written a new introduction, proposing an analytic framework for this literature and discussion of the seven essays contained within the book. Ranging over a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to the volume address such central issues as the construction of legal normativity, interpretive theory and practice in constitutional law, the function of legal metaphors, the interpretive foundations of the law/fact distinction, and the role of politics in contemporary critical legal studies. Law and the Order of Culture will attract a broad and eclectic readership across many disciplines. Law and the Order of Culture is an outstanding collection of essays that explores the cultural creation of legal meaning, addressing interpretive processes within the law as well as the social constitution of legal doctrine. Originally published in Representations, these essays are at the center of the "law and literature" movement which exemplifies a burgeoning literature in feminist jurisprudence, critical legal studies, and other work that has focused on law as evidence of cultural orderings. For this edition Robert Post has written a new introduction, proposing an analytic framework for this literature and discussion of the seven essays contained within the book. Ranging over a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, the contributors to the volume address such central issues as the construction of legal normativity, interpretive theory and practice in constitutional law, the function of legal metaphors, the interpretive foundations of the law/fact distinction, and the role of politics in contemporary critical legal studies. Law and the Order of Culture will attract a broad and eclectic readership across many disciplines.

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

2003-07-03
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

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  • Author: Austin D. Sarat
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 0822384752
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 377

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity—such as ethnicity, race, or religion—has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches—including legal realism, law and economics, and law and society. As Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon demonstrate, scholars of the law have begun to mine the humanities for new theoretical tools and kinds of knowledge. Crucial to this effort is cultural studies, with its central focus on the relationship between knowledge and power. Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions—as in Aldolph Eichmann’s 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts. Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young

Legal Culture in the United States: An Introduction

2016-02-22
Legal Culture in the United States: An Introduction

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  • Author: Kirk Junker
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1317245555
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 222

For law students and lawyers to successfully understand and practice law in the U.S., recognition of the wider context and culture which informs the law is essential. Simply learning the legal rules and procedures in isolation is not enough without an appreciation of the culture that produced them. This book provides the reader with an understandable introduction to the ways in which U.S. law reflects its culture and each chapter begins with questions to guide the reader, and concludes with questions for review, challenge and further understanding. Kirk W. Junker explores cultural differences, employing history, social theory, philosophy, and language as "reference frames," which are then applied to the rules and procedures of the U.S. legal system in the book’s final chapter. Through these cultural reference frames readers are provided with a set of interpretive tools to inform their understanding of the substance and institutions of the law. With a deeper understanding of this cultural context, international students will be empowered to more quickly adapt to their studies; more comprehensively understand the role of the attorney in the U.S. system; draw comparisons with their own domestic legal systems, and ultimately become more successful in their legal careers both in the U.S. and abroad.

Law as Culture

2017-03-17
Law as Culture

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  • Author: Lawrence Rosen
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • ISBN: 1400887585
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 232

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.

Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court

2020-10-30
Intersections of Law and Culture at the International Criminal Court

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  • Author: Julie Fraser
  • Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
  • ISBN: 1839107308
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 456

This pioneering book explores the intersections of law and culture at the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering insights into how notions of culture affect the Court’s legal foundations, functioning and legitimacy, both in theory and in practice.

Legal Culture in the United States: An Introduction

2016-02-22
Legal Culture in the United States: An Introduction

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  • Author: Kirk Junker
  • Publisher: Routledge
  • ISBN: 1317245547
  • Category : Law
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 294

For law students and lawyers to successfully understand and practice law in the U.S., recognition of the wider context and culture which informs the law is essential. Simply learning the legal rules and procedures in isolation is not enough without an appreciation of the culture that produced them. This book provides the reader with an understandable introduction to the ways in which U.S. law reflects its culture and each chapter begins with questions to guide the reader, and concludes with questions for review, challenge and further understanding. Kirk W. Junker explores cultural differences, employing history, social theory, philosophy, and language as "reference frames," which are then applied to the rules and procedures of the U.S. legal system in the book’s final chapter. Through these cultural reference frames readers are provided with a set of interpretive tools to inform their understanding of the substance and institutions of the law. With a deeper understanding of this cultural context, international students will be empowered to more quickly adapt to their studies; more comprehensively understand the role of the attorney in the U.S. system; draw comparisons with their own domestic legal systems, and ultimately become more successful in their legal careers both in the U.S. and abroad.