Cultural Expertise and Socio-legal Studies: Introduction

This special issue is the outcome of the Cultural Expertise in Socio-Legal Studies and History conference held on the 15-16 December in Oxford at the Centre for SocioLegal Studies and Maison Française. It was the inaugural conference for the project titled Cultural Expertise in Europe: What is it useful for? (EURO-EXPERT) funded by the European Research Council. This special issue includes contributions by scholars specializing in law and culture in civil and common law traditions both in and outside Europe. Although the stress of EURO-EXPERT is on the European context, the inclusion of contributions from non-European contexts suggests the necessity for a global understanding of cultural expertise. The aim of this special issue is to explore in-country socio-legal approaches revolving around the use of cultural expertise whose threshold definition was formulated as follows: “the special knowledge that enables socio-legal scholars, or, more generally speaking, cultural mediators the so-called cultural brokers-, to locate and describe relevant facts in light of the particular background of the claimants and litigants and for the use of the court” (Holden 2011: 2). This definition is scrutinized in this special issue against a variety of contexts and socio-legal approaches in view of fine-tuning, updating and a re-contextualisation within legal theories, and legal precedents in all those contexts where areas of cultural studies and socio-legal studies are used to solve conflicts and in connection with rights. The authors have explored the applicability of the definition of cultural expertise in a variety of legal systems. All papers of this special issue adopt an approach that can be qualified as socio-legal for the focus on the relationship between law and society. However, depending on the academic background of the authors, different components of socio-legal approaches have been chosen. The reason for such a purposeful variety is to foster a debate that is diverse, inclusive, constructive, and innovative in order to lay the basis for evaluating the use and impact of cultural expertise in modern litigation both in and out of court. In this introduction I will shortly recall the genesis of the conceptualisation of the notion of cultural expertise and its relationship with the well-known concept of cultural defence; I will then briefly outline the positioning of EURO-EXPERT regarding notions of power and culture to which most of the authors in this special issue refer as a variable in the social phenomena dealt with by cultural expertise; and eventually introduce the contributions to this special issue.