scholarly journals Law as Culture? Culturalist Perspectives in Legal Theory and Theory of Methods

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-270
Author(s):  
Franz Reimer
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Cultural Practice ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Law ◽  
Fact Finding ◽  
The Concept Of Law ◽  
Traditional Approaches

This Article questions in what sense law in the German tradition has been—and can still be—considered a form of culture. The Article offers an overview of traditional approaches to law and culture in German Legal Theory and the Theory of Methods, and argues that the law has shifted from being perceived as culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to being in contrast with culture, which is considered the “other” of the law. Mediated by “legal culture,” the discourse pendulum has swung back to the notion of “Law as Culture” during the last three decades. Thomas Gutmann, the German lawyer, has fiercely challenged equating law with culture, describing it as “murky” and irrelevant. Similarly, the concept of “Law as Culture” is questioned by the provocations of “Law and Affect.” This Article claims that, irrespective of conceptual framework trends, applying the law remains a highly challenging cultural practice in terms of both fact-finding and interpreting legal norms.

The Values and Norms of Islam

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Ahmed Akgunduz
Keyword(s):  
Islamic Law ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Moral Norms ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Value System ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Islamic Legal Theory ◽  
The World ◽  
Over Time

AbstractIslamic Law is one of the broadest and most comprehensive systems of legislation in the world. It was applied, through various schools of thought, from one end of the Muslim world to the other. It also had a great impact on other nations and cultures. We will focus in this article on values and norms in Islamic law. The value system of Islam is immutable and does not tolerate change over time for the simple fact that human nature does not change. The basic values and needs (which can be called maṣlaḥa) are classified hierarchically into three levels: (1) necessities (Ḍarūriyyāt), (2) convenience (Ḥājiyyāt), and (3) refinements (Kamāliyyāt=Taḥsīniyyāt). In Islamic legal theory (Uṣūl al‐fiqh) the general aim of legislation is to realize values through protecting and guaranteeing their necessities (al-Ḍarūriyyāt) as well as stressing their importance (al‐ Ḥājiyyāt) and their refinements (taḥsīniyyāt).In the second part of this article we will draw attention to Islamic norms. Islam has paid great attention to norms that protect basic values. We cannot explain all the Islamic norms that relate to basic values, but we will classify them categorically. We will focus on four kinds of norms: 1) norms (rules) concerned with belief (I’tiqādiyyāt), 2) norms (rules) concerned with law (ʿAmaliyyāt); 3) general legal norms (Qawā‘id al‐ Kulliyya al‐Fiqhiyya); 4) norms (rules) concerned with ethics (Wijdāniyyāt = Aḵlāqiyyāt = Ādāb = social and moral norms).

scholarly journals CASTING THE LIGHT OF THE THEORY OF OPPOSITION ONTO HOHFELD'S FUNDAMENTAL LEGAL CONCEPTS

Legal Theory ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
João Alberto de Oliveira Lima ◽  
Cristine Griffo ◽  
João Paulo A. Almeida ◽  
Giancarlo Guizzardi ◽  
Marcio Iorio Aranha
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
The Core ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Law ◽  
Opposition Theory ◽  
Legal Concepts ◽  
Number Of Authors

Abstract At the core of Hohfeld's contribution to legal theory is a conceptual framework for the analysis of the legal positions occupied by agents in intersubjective legal relations. Hohfeld presented a system of eight “fundamental” concepts relying on notions of opposition and correlation. Throughout the years, a number of authors have followed Hohfeld in applying the notion of opposition to analyze legal concepts. Many of these authors have accounted for Hohfeld's theory in direct analogy with the standard deontic hexagon. This paper reviews some of these accounts and extends them employing recent developments from opposition theory. In particular, we are able to extend application of opposition theory to an open conception of the law. We also account for the implications of abandoning the assumption of conflict-freedom and admitting seemingly conflicting legal positions. This enables a fuller analysis of Hohfeld's conceptual analytical framework. We also offer a novel analysis of Hohfeld's power positions.

Preventive Confinement of Dangerous Offenders

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Morse
Keyword(s):  
Legal Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Issue ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Sexual Predators ◽  
Dangerous Offenders ◽  
New Form ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Constitutional Regime

How to respond justly to the dangers persistent violent offenders present is a vexing moral and legal issue. On the one hand, we wish to reduce predation; on the other, we want to treat predators fairly. The central theme of this paper is that it is difficult to achieve both goals without compromising one of them, and that both are being seriously undermined. I begin by explaining the legal theory, doctrine and practice governing dangerous offenders (DO) and demonstrate that the law leaves a gap in the ability to confine them. Next I explore the means by which the law has overtly or covertly sought to fill the gap. Many of these measures, especially the new form of civil commitment for sexual predators, dangerously conflate moral and medical categories. I conclude that pure preventive detention is more common than we usually assume, but that this practice violates fundamental assumptions concerning liberty under the American constitutional regime.

scholarly journals ABUSE OF THE RIGHT TO INITIATE BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS

2020 ◽  
pp. 259-264
Author(s):  
В. В. Дутка
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Legal Entity ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Bankruptcy Procedure ◽  
Good For ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Right ◽  
Ordinary Citizens ◽  
Legal Entities

The relevance of the article is that society’s attitude to the bankruptcy procedure is ambiguous: ordinary citizens who have never been involved in bankruptcy proceedings often perceive it as a certain negative phenomenon that should be avoided and avoided. On the other hand, for many debtors, bankruptcy becomes the “lifeline” with which they can repay their claims to creditors and start financial life “from scratch”. At the same time, it should be noted that many debtors and creditors use the bankruptcy procedure not for the purposes provided by the legislator in the relevant legal norms, but to satisfy only their own interests, to the detriment of the interests of other parties to the case. In this regard, the study of the abuse of the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings becomes relevant. The article is devoted to the study of abuse of the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings. The purpose of the article is to study the abuse of the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings and highlight the author’s vision of this issue. According to the results of the study, the author concludes that the application to the debtor of bankruptcy procedures can be both good for the debtor and to the detriment of the interests of his creditors. Entities that could potentially abuse the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings are: creditors of the debtor – a legal entity, as well as debtors – legal entities, individuals and individuals – entrepreneurs. The fact of exemption of debtors from the court fee for filing an application to initiate bankruptcy proceedings is not only an unjustified luxury for our state, but also only contributes to the abuse of the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings by unscrupulous debtors. In order to reduce the number of cases of abuse of the right to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, the author justifies the need to complicate the conditions for opening bankruptcy proceedings, for example, by returning the conditions provided by the Law of Ukraine “On Restoration of Debtor’s Solvency or Recognition of Debtor’s Bankruptcy”.

scholarly journals WHY LEGAL THEORY IS POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Legal Theory ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-346
Author(s):  
William A. Edmundson
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Evaluative Judgments ◽  
Adequate Theory ◽  
The Concept Of Law ◽  
Theory Of Law ◽  
Legal Theorist

The concept of law is not a theorist's invention but one that people use every day. Thus one measure of the adequacy of a theory of law is its degree of fidelity to the concept as it is understood by those who use it. That means “saving the truisms” as far as possible. There are important truisms about the law that have an evaluative cast. The theorist has either to say what would make those evaluative truisms true or to defend her choice to dismiss them as false of law or not of the essence of law. Thus the legal theorist must give an account of the truth grounds of the more central evaluative truisms about law. This account is a theory of legitimacy. It will contain framing judgments that state logical relations between descriptive judgments and directly evaluative judgments. Framing judgments are not directly evaluative, nor do they entail directly evaluative judgments, but they are nonetheless moral judgments. Therefore, an adequate theory of law must make (some) moral judgments. This means that an adequate theory of law has to take a stand on certain (but not all) contested issues in political philosophy. Legal theory is thus a branch of political philosophy. Moreover, one cannot be a moral-aim functionalist about legal institutions without compromising one's positivism about legal norms.

scholarly journals LAW'S EMPIRE: ENGLISH LEGAL CULTURES AT HOME AND ABROAD

2005 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARGOT C. FINN
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

scholarly journals Was Duplessis Right?

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-436
Author(s):  
Roderick A. Macdonald
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Fiftieth Anniversary ◽  
The Other ◽  
Judicial Decision ◽  
The Law ◽  
Good And Evil

Given the inclination of legal scholars to progressively displace the meaning of a judicial decision from its context toward abstract propositions, it is no surprise that at its fiftieth anniversary, Roncarelli v. Duplessis has come to be interpreted in Manichean terms. The complex currents of postwar society and politics in Quebec are reduced to a simple story of good and evil in which evil is incarnated in Duplessis’s “persecution” of Roncarelli. In this paper the author argues for a more nuanced interpretation of the case. He suggests that the thirteen opinions delivered at trial and on appeal reflect several debates about society, the state and law that are as important now as half a century ago. The personal socio-demography of the judges authoring these opinions may have predisposed them to decide one way or the other; however, the majority and dissenting opinions also diverged (even if unconsciously) in their philosophical leanings in relation to social theory (internormative pluralism), political theory (communitarianism), and legal theory (pragmatic instrumentalism). Today, these dimensions can be seen to provide support for each of the positions argued by Duplessis’s counsel in Roncarelli given the state of the law in 1946.

scholarly journals Czy idea tak zwanej wtórnej legalności się broni?

2017 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
pp. 401-420
Author(s):  
Jarosław Majewski
Keyword(s):  
Legal Culture ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Final Conclusion ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Made In

Is the idea of so-called “secondary legality” defensible?The aim of the study is critical analysis of the idea of so-called “secondary legality” of an act used by some jurists to explain types of behaviour falling into the category of circumstances excluding lawlessness of an act justification, namely to define the relation between such types of behaviour and the legal system as a whole, and the various sanctioned norms that are part of the system. First, the author examines the relation between the assumption that a type of behaviour which falls within the category of circumstances excluding lawlessness of an act constitutes a legal transgression of the sanctioned norm, and the basic assumptions made in the Polish legal culture concerning the process of creation and application of the law as well as its systematic analysis. He demonstrates that consistent use of the secondary legality category would require a considerable remodelling of these assumptions, above all, rejection of the assumption that legal norms are introduced to be met as well as all consequences stemming from this assumption as well as abandonment of the approach to the law as a set of legal norms that is internally cohesive. Next, the author analyses the internal aspects of the idea of secondary legality of an act. He demonstrates that it encompasses contradictory statements: on the one hand that justifi able behaviour constitutes socially harmful, negative and thus a typical attack on legal interest, and on the other hand that the social benefits ultimately outweigh losses in the case of justifiable behaviour. All the above justifies the author’s final conclusion that the category of secondary legality of an act is not useful.

scholarly journals On an Interpreter’s Game with the Legal Text and Extratextual Factors in the Derivative Concept of Legal Interpretation

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paweł Jabłoński ◽  
Przemysław Kaczmarek
Keyword(s):  
Legal Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Legal Interpretation ◽  
Personal Factors ◽  
Legal Text ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One ◽  
Derivative Concept

The aim of this paper is to show the derivative concept of legal interpretation from the point of view of the structure of limits of the juridical power. This structure includes the politico-legal culture, the legal text, the juridical culture, and personal factors, such as ethical and aesthetic judgements. These days, the derivative concept is the most influential Polish theory of legal interpretation. According to this concept the process of interpreting the law is a kind of a game between the legal text and extratextual factors, which are treated as extratextual limits of juridical power. On the one hand, the legal text does not determine the full meaning of the law, although it has great importance for it. On the other hand, the derivative concept precisely identifies certain others factors that are relevant for the content of law.

scholarly journals OVERCOMING LEGAL NIGILISM, RESOLUTION OF LEGAL CONFLICTS AND RESTRICTION OF LAW ABUSING- VALIDITY BASIS OF LAW FORMATION

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Exclusion Zone ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Legal Principles ◽  
The Law ◽  
Real Assets ◽  
Abuse Of Law

The aim of the article is to investigate the reasons of legal nihilism and abuse of law origin, to find the optimal ways of overcoming these negative legal phenomena and, as a result, to solve legal conflicts in the activity of state authorities and local self-government, their officials, providing recommendations on introducing liability for law abusing. The process of establishing respect to the law is primarily connected with overcoming legal nihilism, legal conflicts and abuse of law limitation. Legal nihilism retards the decent development of the legal system, encumbers the access of society members to legal values and becomes a serious obstacle on the way of the formation of civil society. Specificity of any legal conflict lays in the fact that is its features and peculiarities are shown, seen and characterized from the position of law, specific legal norms and their requirements, decrees, orders to be perceived and evaluated differently by subjects of law A sense of respect together with legal awareness allows a person logically, reasonably, rationally evaluate and find the most suitable way of behavior and legitimate actions. When manifesting real respect here operates one of the important legal principles of civil society - respect for the rights and freedoms of others as their own. This principle is based on the necessity to keep away from any actions (inaction) so directly or indirectly worsening social or legal status of an individual. We mean here exclusion of not only unlawful actions, but also the facts of rude misuse of law. Factors of rude misuse of law are real assets of law practice, therefore, when understanding problems related to the establishment and development of legal awareness, legal culture, and respect for the law, it is necessary to consider the fact that legislation doesn`t forbid to do evil and is the abuse of law in its purest form. And it cannot be avoided, since law shouldn`t be ubiquitous, otherwise a person would be completely deprived of freedom. However, a civil society, betaking spiritual and moral potential capabilities, can create a certain exclusion zone for people challenging law abusing.

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