The Concept of Culture and the Cultural Study of Law. An Essay

Abstract

Law is culture, not its consequence. This is one of the fundamental premises of the cultural analysis of law. The content of the category ‘culture’, however, is one of the most elusive in the humanities: it is not easy to specify its limits or make explicit its fundamental components. It is not easy to specify either what should be the most fruitful way to approach the academic study of legal culture. There is no consensus on the premises and methods with which cultural studies of law should espouse. In this essay I would like to examine two ways of understanding legal culture and the cultural analysis of law. The first perspective is what I would call a monist cultural analysis; the second is what I would like to call a pluralist cultural analysis. More precisely, in this essay I would like to examine the concept of culture with which the monist cultural analysis of law is committed to, the methodological consequences that this concept generates and the limits that these concept and method have to accurately describe modern legal cultures. In this essay, I would also like to explore the concept of culture offered by the pluralist cultural analysis of law and the conceptual and methodological contributions that this perspective could make to the understanding of modern legal cultures.