ABSTRACT
Legal culture, in its most general sense, is one way of describing relatively stable patterns of legally oriented social behaviour and attitudes. But the concept of legal culture is certainly not a simple one. Enquiries into legal culture try to understand puzzling features of the role and the rule of law within given societies. The adoption of dissimilar legal models is perhaps most likely where the legal transfer is imposed by third parties as part of a colonial project and/or insisted on as a condition of trade, aid, alliance or diplomatic recognition. Lawrence Friedman is also the author of the classic distinction between 'internal' and 'external' legal culture. The mainstream social science explanatory approach to legal culture typically seeks to assign causal priority between competing hypothetical variables. The role of the Strasbourg court well illustrates the complexities of charting the relationship between the local and the global in studying legal culture.
