Law, culture and Euro-crime: using Spiral to teach French law

Abstract

Stories about law and lawyers are ubiquitous within Western popular culture. These stories have an influence on popular legal culture: the beliefs and values which ordinary people hold about the law. The dominance of popular cultural stories based within an Anglo-American legal context is thus significant, in particular in the forming of a perception within popular legal culture that legal systems are homogenous. An understanding of legal diversity: that is, of law as contingent on cultural, social and political conditions adds a valuable dimension to legal education, both from a vocational perspective and in terms of the academic value of the discipline. This paper addresses the relevance to legal education of cultural approaches to law, and argues that stories from popular culture can be effective ways of introducing students to legal diversity. The example of the French show Engrenages, shown in the UK as Spiral, is used, as it deliberately situates itself within French legal culture and engages with debates that are specific to that culture. Reflection on the supposedly “universal” themes within global popular culture and the underlying specificities of the storylines in Spiral can help students perceive systemic and cultural difference at a deep level.