Popular Legal Culture Research Articles

Legal pedagogy and popular legal culture in Poland. Problems, challenges, analysis of the state of research

The text operationalizes the main research categories selected during the implementation of a research project of a social innovation nature: legal pedagogy and popular legal culture. The aim of the study is to establish the meanings of the concepts and provide a concise description of the project activities carried out. The text is one of a series of scientific publications presenting and documenting each stage of work on the project financed and organized by the Center for Academic Entrepreneurship and Technology Transfer of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. Problems with identifying the identity of the concept of legal pedagogy have been highlighted (it is assigned legal, sociological and pedagogical identity). In addition, a thread showing the relationship between legal culture and religion and morality has been included. The text is an introduction to in-depth analyses.

Scientific research entangled in the context of social needs. A practical example of the implementation of the evaluation criterion social impact: original research project Popular Legal Culture

The article addresses the issue of evaluating the scientific activities of universities in Poland and around the world in relation to the new, third evaluation criterion: the qualitatively measured impact of scientific activities on the functioning of society and the economy. The context of the text is a broadly understood critical analysis of universities' policies towards contemporary social problems: exclusion, poverty, helplessness, ignorance of rights and obligations. Social impact, as one of the three criteria for assessing scientific units, has a chance to become a tool for eliminating social inequalities. It is an idea of broadly understood social policy to involve universities in social life. Thanks to the new tasks given to researchers, they have a real chance to improve the world around them and look at local problems and challenges. The text will present the original idea of a research team whose aim is to spread the legal awareness of students of pedagogy and social work, as well as teachers working in schools and social workers working with the socially excluded.

Reflections of Legal Culture in Television Comedy: Social Critique and Schadenfreude in the US Series \u201cFrasier\u201d

Traces of law can be found in all aspects of life, law is ubiquitous. People relate law to some of their most desperate life situations, and sometimes law serves them well. It is no wonder that law features prominently in popular comedies. There also is a tradition to ridicule authorities and social institutions, and the law, courts and legal professionals are no exemption. In order to be understandable and “funny”, there needs to be at least a fleeting familiarity of the audience with them. Popular tv comedies thus offer a unique window into popular legal culture: they show elements of law and aspects of its workings, of the behaviour of lawyers, which the public relates to. For example, previous media coverage, other lawyer television and movies, or indeed personal experience, may have introduced them and something made this information stick, perhaps a rather objectionable practice. “Law” in this context has to be taken in its widest possible meaning as “living law” (Eugen Ehrlich), which means including those non-statutory rules by which society is organized, by which people live their daily lives. A further dimension which lends itself to good entertainment is rule-breaking behaviour, which often testifies for the validity of laws, only that they are inconvenient in certain situations. Again, a constellation that invites mockery, humour and Schadenfreude. The manuscript will apply a cultural and socio-legal perspective to the depiction of things legal in one of the most outstanding US television comedies, shown to audiences internationally: “Frasier” (1993–2004).

Символ Порядка Или Знак Раздора? о Случаях Надругательства Над Изображениями императора И Членов Его Семьи (На Примере Северо-Западного Края)

The article examines sixty-four cases of defamation of images depicting members of the Romanov dynasty between 1884 to 1914, found in the files of the Vilna Circuit Court whose jurisdiction included Vilna, Kovna, Grodna, and Minsk provinces. Russian imperial law classified verbal or physical assault on the tsar's portrait as a political crime, along with other forms of "insult of the emperor." Although public disrespect of royal portraits accounted for a small fraction of all the registered acts of lèse-majesté, the studied cases offer a unique perspective on the semiotics of power in the Northwest Region of the empire and expose the attitude of its multicultural population to the supreme authority. These cases also suggest a fairly wide proliferation of the tsar's portraits in the region. A portrait of the monarch was a mandatory symbol of state authority in public places, but this was by no means the main usage of the royal portraits. Ordinary people – peasants, workers, and small traders – bought lithograph images of the emperor to decorate their private quarters. As the author elaborates based on her cases, their motives were not so much political and ideological as pragmatic. She concludes that, in the Northwest Region, at the turn of the twentieth century owning a tsar's image was an integral part of the popular legal culture and practice.

The Every Day Work of Studying the Law in Everyday Life

Susan Silbey began her academic training in political science and in the course of her studies became a sociologist of law, the last two decades as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's anthropology department and management school. The disciplinary transformations ground, in part, her attention to the ways in which the everyday life of scholarship has led her to study the everyday life of the law. In this article, she describes her scholarly life through seven chapters of relatively distinct challenges and themes. Across the arc of her life, she identifies the recurrent influence of both serendipity and theoretical inference acting within the immediate constraints of family and personal capacity. Reading across descriptions of her work on regulatory enforcement, dispute negotiation and mediation, and popular legal culture and consciousness, she points to the necessity of reconciling on-the-ground vicissitudes of doing legal work with the theories and narratives social scientists construct to make sense of institutions and history. She muses on theoretical attempts to align the particular and the general, the micro and macro forces working in legal cultures, and concludes by celebrating the ubiquity of social ordering whose own momentum both seduces and frustrates social scientists.

Legal Culture on Labour Disputes of Migrant Construction Workers in China

In the past 30–40 years, migrant workers have become an increasingly significant force in promoting social and legal changes in China. As such, their legal culture is worthy of study for many reasons. This study focuses on migrant construction workers’ values, ideas, opinions, and attitudes with regard to their labour disputes, in the context of economic reform and globalization. Based on an analysis of primary data collected from fieldwork undertaken in Hubei Province, this study finds that migrant construction workers’ dispute resolution primarily remains conservative and informal, and that they are more aggressive and assertive than they were in the previous decades. The primary data illustrates that imported Western legal norms, such as contract, litigation, law, etc., have so far had limited influence on the popular legal culture of Chinese migrant workers, at least in the construction industry; while traditional local values in China, such as family ethic, morality, and harmony, still play a dominant role in their daily lives.

The Rise and Fall of Bad Judge: Lady Justice is No Tramp

Much of the fabric of the modern world is woven on the loom of popular culture. While scholars have defined pop culture differently, there is a general consensus as to its strong influence on modern society. As television has become our society's principal means of storytelling, its offerings concerning the world of lawyers have become a staple of the popular culture consumed by Americans. There is a feedback loop between law and popular culture which is self-perpetuating: popular culture influences the viewing public's perception of the law, which in turn affects the public's expectations, which are reinforced by the misconduct of actual members of the legal profession, which affects what the networks will portray as popular legal culture. This cause and effect scenario is the result of what might be referred to in dance parlance as the Legal Culture Two-Step.In light of the self-perpetuating nature of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step, the burning inquiry must be whether there is any way to interrupt or ameliorate the ramifications of the relationship between law and televised legal popular culture in instances where what is broadcast defaces the law as an honorable profession. The urgency of addressing this query was highlighted with the airing of a new series during the fall of 2014, Bad Judge. Bad Judge serves as a prototype for the type of legal shows which television should not be broadcasting and is a perfect platform on which to illustrate the harm which may result from the effect. To delve a bit deeper into the underpinnings of the Popular Legal Culture Two-Step put forth in this piece, Part II of the article discusses the cultivation theory, heuristic processing, and the process known as resonance, the lynchpins for the premise that television viewing does affect the viewer's perception of reality. It also examines the influence of resonance in the context of both syndi-court shows and actual incidents of judicial misconduct. Part III critiques a number of episodes of Bad Judge and evaluates the actions and conduct of Judge Rebecca Wright in light California's Canons of Judicial Ethics. It also focuses upon a written entreaty to NBC made by the Miami-Dade chapter of the Florida Association for Women Lawyers requesting cancellation of the show. Finally, the article explores possible responses to the demeaning portrayal of the judicial system and female judges and attorneys conveyed in Bad Judge in order to ameliorate the influence of television's of viewer perceptions of the legal world and to prevent such perceptions from becoming viewer reality.

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

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.

Law, Popular Legal Culture and the Case of Kansas, 1854-1856

Law, Popular Legal Culture and the Case of Kansas, 1854-1856

Some Myths about the Jury System from the Perspective of American Cinematography

The popularity of the jury in the US legal system makes it, on the one hand, an attractive research subject for many specialists in American Studies, and, on the other, a source of inspiration for Cultural Studies. Many films and TV series create general myths about the structure, operation and character of jury trials in the United States. Among the most typical myths are: the 12‑member requirement, the necessity to achieve unanimous verdicts, and vast politicization of the voir dire procedure. The topic of law and culture is very attractive among American scholars, as both areas have a significant impact on the everyday life of not only American society, but also other societies around the world. Facing the complexity of popular legal culture, the purpose of the article is to confront the most popular myths of jury trials shaped by specific works of American cinematography, such as 12 Angry Men, The Verdict, Runaway Jury, Murder One, and Law and Order. The most common misunderstandings of how the jury system works shall be revealed by a brief analysis of Supreme Court precedents referring to jury functioning in the contemporary US legal system.

Law, Popular Legal Culture, and the Case of Kansas, 1854-1856

In the wake of the movie Lincoln and the 150th anniversary of events such as the Emancipation Proclamation and the Battle of Gettysburg, more attention and discussion in 2013 is likely to be directed to the causes, effects, and legacy of the Civil War, in law and social impact. This article contends that there is one historical time and moment which should not be overlooked – the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and period of time with events relating to Kansas from approximately 1854-1856 which preceded the onset of the Civil War.This Article applies Professor Friedman’s framework of popular legal culture to appeals for emigration to Kansas made by abolitionists and Northeasterners in response to the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Instruments of popular culture, including circulars, handbooks, music, poetry, speeches, and especially newspaper heavily influenced migration to Kansas from 1854 to 1856 as a direct response to the notion of popular sovereignty embraced by the Kansas-Nebraska Act.This article concludes that by engaging in a close reading of Kansas rhetoric from 1854-1856 in the instruments of popular culture which responded to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the significant change in tone helps to explain how popular culture and the response to the legislation led to the growing polarization between North and South prior to the onset of the Civil War.

Asymmetric adaptive legal cultures amongst minorities and Euro-migrants

In the post-communist period, there has been considerable pressure towards a more convergent pan-European legal culture. Under international pressure, formal laws can be changed, but legal cultures that include public perceptions, attitudes, habits, conventions and even behaviour may be resistant to change imposed on them from outside. Formal laws may be changed, but legal cultures still reflect the legacy of communism. This study conducted in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, England and Norway confirms that public perceptions of law and public attitudes towards law, law observance and law enforcement still vary very sharply between the post-communist countries and others, with Ukraine and Norway being at the extremes. But we should not simply equate people with their countries of origin when studying legal cultures. The post-communist period coincides with a surge in personal mobility across Europe. While there is no guarantee that the large number of recent ‘Euro-migrants’ (defined as born in one European country, but now living in another) will necessarily adapt to the general legal culture of the majority in their new country of residence, their natural tendency is to do so. Over the long term, long-established Muslim minorities in Europe have adapted to the general legal culture in the country. So even though they continue to have their own particular concerns, the legal cultures of Muslim minorities tend to vary from one European country to another in much the same way as the legal cultures of the majorities in these countries do. To that extent, their legal cultures are at least as ‘country specific’ as they are ‘Muslim’. On a much shorter time scale, ‘Euro-migrants’ now moving more easily in both directions between former communist and non-communist countries tend to adapt quite quickly to the local legal culture in their new country of residence. Most importantly, however, is this adaptation both asymmetric and benign: the evidence here shows that Euro-migrants are more willing to adapt their legal culture when they move to a more law-abiding part of Europe, but they are less willing (or perhaps just less able) to adapt their legal culture when they move to a less law-abiding and more ‘informal’ society. Overall therefore, increasing migration across the old communist border is likely to exert a net positive influence on the popular legal culture across Europe taken as a whole.

Florida Lawyers Bring Big Screen Drama to the Courtroom: How Popular Culture’s Influence on the Law has Created the Need for ‘Professional Witnesses’

Florida Lawyers Bring Big Screen Drama to the Courtroom: How Popular Culture’s Influence on the Law has Created the Need for ‘Professional Witnesses’

Seeing into Suspicion: Weighing the Probabilities of Contending Narratives, Developing as a Narrative Inquirer

ABSTRACT The author investigates the recent, surprising discovery of the invention of suspicion in the development of 16th century English drama to consider how this discovery might contribute to a new elaboration of narrative inquiry, specifically, to new ways of becoming a narrative inquirer. In her book, The Invention of Suspicion, scholar and author Lorna Hutson (2007), explained “that important changes took place in dramatic narrative—or the way of telling a story on stage—in late sixteenth-century England that corresponded closely to developments in the popular legal culture” (p. 1). Huston identified the origins of the word invention as meaning not something newly created but something discovered or uncovered, in this case about suspicion and how people come to know others’ sometimes hidden motives. Hutson argued that 16th-century England saw the flowering of the uses of realism in English drama which was the direct result of a more frequent use in England of evidence and its evaluation in the law. The author takes up this idea of the invention of suspicion in drama with its interest in proof and evidence, and uncertainty in judging people's motives to explore how this way of knowing could similarly shape inquiries into contending narratives of any day's investigation, offering through the study of such dramas the possibility of a new way of becoming a narrative inquirer.

Mass culture of coercive psychiatric confinement

In Movies on Trial [1], I examine ways in which popular legal culture (especially television, fiction, and film) helps shape American attitudes toward different aspects of legal process and legal system. Among the topics I consider are criminal law, tort law, international law, constitutional law, and comparative law. I am now writing a second book on this subject, Movies on Appeal, and I will be examining a second tier of legal topics or subjects (contract law, property law, the law of war, labor law) and how they are treated in mass culture. Specifically, I will be adding a chapter on law and psychiatry, a course which I have taught to law students for about 20 years. I wish to examine the ways in which popular legal culture helps to shape images (and perceptions) of coercive psychiatric confinement in the United States. Perhaps no other issue in the field of law and psychiatry has captured public attention or the focus of mass culture like involuntary civil commitment. I not only want to compare and contrast images of such confinement in television, fiction, and film, but I want to show concretely what connections exist between popular images and popular perception, and between the latter and professional practice in this field.

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

Law and Custom in the Popular Legal Culture of North Africa

AbstractFocusing on a series of instances from the Islamic courts of North Africa, the present article argues that custom does not stand apart from the sacred law but is seen by its adherents as itself Islamic and hence indissolubly linked to Islamic law. Local practice and universalizing principles of the sharīʿa thus merge in popular conceptualizations. Legal officials also share in the recognition of custom as part of the shariʾa, thus contributing to the overall legitimacy of the sharīʿa and to its capacity to respond to changing circumstances.

Inventing Law in Local Settings: Rethinking Popular Legal Culture

Inventing Law in Local Settings: Rethinking Popular Legal Culture