Legal Families, Legal Culture, and Context

Abstract

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.