ABSTRACT
The last decade has witnessed an intensification of a global process that might best be termed a ‘legalization of culture’, implying that the law is becoming the predominant and most articulate standard of value in many societies. Consequently, ever more social, political and cultural values are expressed in or measured by legal terms at the expense of other normative systems and public moral debates. The US, of course, is in the lead here. The law has become the centre of gravity in the American sense of ‘belonging’; it has replaced culture(s) as the means of inclusion or exclusion par excellence (Karst 1989). What is more, in the US the law literally has become soap opera, fuelling popular culture to an unprecedented extent (Porsdam 1999).
