Comparative Law and Legal Culture

2019 ◽  
pp. 709-733 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Foreign Law

The idea of legal culture has had an important place in major recent debates about the nature and aims of comparative law. The idea of legal culture entails that law should be treated as embedded in a broader culture of some kind. This culture may, but need not necessarily, be seen as wider than the lawyer’s or lawmaker’s professional realm of law. Often, however, conceptions of legal culture encompass much more than this professional juristic realm. They refer to a more general consciousness or experience of law that is widely shared by those who inhabit a particular legal environment, for example, a particular region, nation, or group of nations. Culture appears fundamental—a kind of lens through which all aspects of law must be perceived, or a gateway of understanding through which every comparatist must pass so as to have any genuine access to the meaning of foreign law.

Comparative Law and Legal Culture

2006 ◽  
pp. 708-738 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cotterrell
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Foreign Law

The idea of legal culture has had an important place in major recent debates about the nature and aims of comparative law. The idea of legal culture entails that law should be treated as embedded in a broader culture of some kind. This culture may, but need not necessarily, be seen as wider than the lawyer's or lawmaker's professional realm of law. Often, however, conceptions of legal culture encompass much more than this professional juristic realm. They refer to a more general consciousness or experience of law that is widely shared by those who inhabit a particular legal environment, for example a particular region, nation, or group of nations. Culture appears fundamental — a kind of lens through which all aspects of law must be perceived, or a gateway of understanding through which every comparatist must pass so as to have any genuine access to the meaning of foreign law.

Legal Families, Legal Culture, and Context

2019 ◽  
pp. 200-224
Author(s):  
Uwe Kischel
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Legal Rule ◽  
Legal Order ◽  
Classification Systems ◽  
Legal Environment ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
The Core ◽  
Individual Comparison ◽  
Legal Sociology

This chapter discusses legal families, legal culture, and context. A legal family is structured genealogically, with a parent legal order and its historical offspring or siblings. There are many classification systems for legal families. Classifications of legal systems do not necessarily have to be one-dimensional, they can just as well be hierarchical. Meanwhile, the idea of legal culture has long played an important role in comparative law. However, it is heavily burdened by its origin in legal sociology. Context thus becomes the core concept not only of individual comparison, but also of overall type comparison. In an individual comparison, working with context requires taking into account the entire legal and non-legal environment in which every legal rule exists. In a type comparison, the elements of this environment are aggregated.

scholarly journals Engaging Foreign Law: Not So Liberally

2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (75) ◽  
pp. 11-19
Author(s):  
Pierre Legrand
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Comparative Law ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
Georgetown University ◽  
The Way

Taking its cue from a remarkable institutional initiative owing to the Georgetown University Law Center, this essay contests some of the key assumptions that have informed liberalism’s cosmopolitan turn. In particular, the argument addresses the way in which liberal legal thought has handled a doctrine widely known as “the rule of law”. The text challenges the universalizing drive having informed the dissemination of “the rule of law” and the attendant marginalization of culture in the form of the decredibilization of local knowledge. The paper suggests that “comparative law” can offer a valuable opportunity for the liberal self to revisit its uniformizing ideological commitments  — although not “comparative law” of the mainstream brand.

scholarly journals IL DIRITTO SOCIETARIO TRA DIRITTO COMPARATO E DIRITTO STRANIERO

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giuseppe B. Portale
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Corporate Law ◽  
Private Company ◽  
General Role ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
Specific Regulation ◽  
The One ◽  
Substantive Law ◽  
Theoretical Foundations

The article tackles the issues related to the use of comparative law a source of substantive law in a specific legal system, with specific regard to corporate law. Expanding on previous studies on the general role of comparative law in the framework of sources of law (§ 1), the study argues that the comparative argument may be used to regulate purely domestic cases and as well as a play a crucial role in interpreting internal laws (§§ 1.1, 1.2) and analyzes the theoretical foundations of such process (§ 1.3) as well as the problems caused by the application of foreign law by a domestic judge (§ 2). Subsequently, two examples of such usage of the comparative legal argument are provided, drawn from the Italian corporate law experience (§ 3): on the one hand, the introduction of a specific regulation of a simplified private company (società a responsabilità limitata semplificata), representing a circulation of German (Unternehmergesellschaft- UG) and Belgian (société privée a responsabilité limitée starter) models (§ 3.1); on the other hand, the use of comparative law by in the interpretation of the organization structure in the Italian dualistic system (§ 3.2).

Parker School Summer Program in Foreign Law

1962 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 160-161
Author(s):  
Willis L. M. Reese
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Summer Program ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Foreign Law

The Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law will hold its sixth Summer Program in Foreign Law on the Columbia University campus during the period from June 4 through June 29, 1962.

scholarly journals Expert Opinions on Foreign Law in Court: Applied Comparative Law in the Munich Institute for East European Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-130
Author(s):  
Herbert Küpper
Keyword(s):  
Basic Research ◽  
Comparative Law ◽  
European Law ◽  
Domestic Court ◽  
Legal Research ◽  
East European ◽  
Expert Opinions ◽  
Foreign Law ◽  
The Law

Comparative law has many facets. It often consists of basic research for academic purposes, but it may have a practical side as well. A genuine combination of basic and applied comparative legal research are expert opinions on foreign law for adomestic court. The expert researcher has to fully comprehend the foreign law on the books as well as in action, and has to be able to translate this foreign law into the legal background of the domestic court and into the procedural setting of the law-suit at hand. Taking the ‘Munich Institute for East European Law’ as an example, this essay describes the continuous basic research as a prerequisite for expertise on foreign law, as well as the practice of writing expert opinions for courts of law and authorities with regard to the law of the formerly socialist countries in Europe.

scholarly journals AN INTEGRATED MODEL FOR TRANSLATING LEGAL TEXTS

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (5) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Alenka Kocbek
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Law ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
Third Language ◽  
Skopos Theory ◽  
Legal Texts ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Legal Communication

The paper proposes a model for translating legal texts which is intended to direct the translation process through a series of stages to the final product—a skopos-oriented target text in which the potential pitfalls resulting from translating between different legal languages and systems have been considered. The model unites different translation stances (Snell-Hornby’s integrated approach, the functionalist views with the skopos theory and the concept of cultureme, as well as Chesterman’s theory of memes) with the findings of comparative law regarding differences between legal systems and their impact on legal languages. It consists of ten stages, each addressing one of the specific linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of legal text types. When translating legal texts, a very specific situation may arise with respect to the cultural embeddedness of the target text, since memes of different legal cultures may co-exist on its various levels. This is especially the case when the parties involved in legal communication occurring through translation decide to use a third language as a lingua franca, which may lack any direct correlation with the legal culture(s) underlying such communication.

scholarly journals Ideological manifestations of Christian-legal traditions in the legal system

2021 ◽  
pp. 195-199
Author(s):  
I. V. Mima
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Legal Culture ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Legal Consciousness ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Legal Traditions ◽  
Historical Heritage

The process of development of various directions of objective scientific analysis of problems of the theory of the state and law is investigated; the analysis of transformational processes of Christian-legal traditions in the legal system is carried out. The author argues that the Christian legal traditions are a unique religious and social value, because they embody the fundamental principles of civilized organization of religious relations in society, their regulatory requirements. Christian legal traditions generalize national law at the level of the legal space, reflect the unity of the legal system, which fixes the legal individuality and identity of the country, which affects the formation of the national idea. The author notes that in modern society, Christian legal traditions, Christian legal traditions appear as a legal category, a phenomenon of legal culture, an element of the legal system and a component of the succession of law, which captures generalized legal experience, legal memory, legal knowledge and legal ideas. passed down from generation to generation as acceptable ways of organizing society, models of formation of the legal system, order in law, hierarchy of values in law, etc. The point of view that Christian-legal traditions can be characterized from the standpoint of traditionalism and modernism is substantiated. Socio-historical heritage is a liability of past traditions and a basis for the formation of new traditions. In general, modern society is characterized by the action of real Christian legal traditions, which combines authentic and non-authentic Christian legal traditions and socio-historical heritage in ensuring the heredity of social development with its previous stages. Authenticity is determined by the preconditions for the formation of Christian legal traditions in society, arising from the laws of the stages of its development. Inauthentic Christian legal traditions are created artificially and act as declared social norms that have not yet confirmed their value nature in the course of social practice. They are most often observed in societies undergoing transformational periods of their existence, during which there is a need for new methods of regulating social relations and means of community unification. Such Christian legal traditions can be used to fill gaps in the mechanism of social and normative regulation of social relations by connecting the past with new conditions and needs. In addition, Christian-legal traditions occupy an important place in the socio-normative organization of modern society, and during the historical process of development of society the content of Christian-legal traditions was influenced by ideological, cultural and socio-economic deformations of society. Christian-legal traditions as religious-normative principles ensure the realization of Christian-legal ideals and values in religious relations, their indisputable status in public life. Keywords: legal system, Christian-legal traditions, legal heritage, traditionalism and modernism, legal culture, legal consciousness, authentic and non-authentic Christian-legal traditions.

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