Legal culture and cultures of legality

Culture is a hotly debated and contested construct, evidenced by the existence and content of this handbook. The importation of this term into legal scholarship is fraught with unfortunate confusion. The meaning of the word “culture” alone is unstable, theoretically and empirically; adding “legal” to “culture” only exacerbates the conceptual tumult. Some confusion derives from intermingling two meanings of culture. One meaning names a particular world of beliefs and practices associated with a specific group. The second meaning is analytic rather than empirical, referring to the outcome of social analysis-an abstracted system of symbols and meanings, both the product and context of social action. In the former use, referring to the distinctive customs, opinions, and practices of a particular group or society, the term is often used in the plural, as in the legal cultures of Japan and China, or in reference to African or Latin cultures. In the latter analytic sense, the word is used in the singular, as in legal culture, or the culture of academia. Since the cultural turn of the 1980s, use of the word culture has proliferated so much

that the historic confusion has infested scholarship in almost every field of inquiry where it is invoked. In addition to the thousands of journal articles, one can find hundreds of books with “law” and “culture” or “legal culture” in the title. Some of these call for cultural study of law as if it had not been going on for decades; others entitle collections of diverse essays under a general rubric of law and culture; yet others do treat culture as a serious theoretical concept (e.g. Benton 2002; Bracey 2006; Rosen 2006). The unprecedented and rapidly proliferating use of the concept has unfortunately exacerbated the traditionally unruly discourse. In this essay, I hope to offer helpful clarification, distinguish alternative uses, and provide a short lexicon to some of the concepts of legal culture’s progeny in legal scholarship-legal ideology, legal consciousness, legality, and cultures of legality.