Perspectives of Legal Culture

Abstract

Despite many doubts and criticisms, the use and popularity of the term legal culture have been growing steadily since 1969, when Lawrence Friedman first coined it. Regardless of the difficulties in conceptualising and operationalising legal culture, it is widely used in research and theoretical work. This paper investigates how researchers are overcoming conceptual issues, as well as the similarities and differences in approaches to legal culture and their effects on the comprehensibility and coherence of the concept. Through a systematic literature review of scholarly papers published in two citation bibliographic databases – Web of Science and Scopus – that contain the term legal culture in the title, this paper identifies definitions of legal culture, theoretical assumptions, research methods and specific topics depicted within the field of legal culture. The analysis indicates heterogeneous approaches to legal culture, accompanied by inconsistency in understanding and applying the concept. The notion of legal culture is related to various topics but mainly used as an intervening variable; without empirical research, authors use the term as hypothetical and self-evident, assuming its impact on law and society. Besides, the analysis identified various forms of defining and explaining the legal culture and different methodologies, amongst which a descriptive approach prevails. Based on the insight into scholarly articles on legal culture, the review concludes with suggestions for improving future research and the explanatory power of legal culture.