Cooperation across borders requires both knowledge of and understanding of different cultures. This is especially true when it comes to the law. This handbook is the first to comprehensively present selected legal cultures based on a very specific set of structural elements which can be found in all such cultures. Legal cultures are a product of and impacted by certain fundamental and commonly shared ideas on and expectations of the law. In all modern societies these ideas are to a certain degree institutionalized or at least embedded in institutionalized practices. These practices determine the way lawyers are educated and apply the law, how they engage with the ongoing internationalization of law and what kind of values they adhere to. Looking at these elements separately enables the reader to identify similarities and differences and to explain them contextually. Understanding these general features of legal cultures can help avoid misunderstandings or misinterpretations of foreign law and its application. Accordingly, this handbook is a necessary starting point for all kinds of legal comparative studies conducted by academics, students, judges and other legal practitioners.

This book explores the interface between law and popular culture, two subjects of enormous current importance and influence. Exploring how they affect each other, each chapter discusses a legally themed film or television show, such as Philadelphia or Dead Man Walking, and treats it as both a cultural and a legal text, illustrating how popular culture both constructs our perceptions of law, and changes the way that players in the legal system behave. Written without theoretical jargon, Law and Popular Culture: A Course Book is intended for use in undergraduate or graduate courses and can be taught by anyone who enjoys pop culture and is interested in law.

The thoroughly revised and updated second edition of the Routledge Handbook of Cultural Sociology provides an unparalleled overview of sociological and related scholarship on the complex relations of culture to social structures and everyday life. With 70 essays written by scholars from around the world, the book brings diverse approaches into dialogue, charting new pathways for understanding culture in our global era. Short, accessible chapters by contributing authors address classic questions, emergent issues, and new scholarship on topics ranging from cultural and social theory to politics and the state, social stratification, identity, community, aesthetics, and social and cultural movements. In addition, contributors explore developments central to the constitution and reproduction of culture, such as power, technology, and the organization of work. This handbook is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in a wide range of subfields within sociology, as well as cultural studies, media and communication, and postcolonial theory.

Bringing a timely synthesis to the field, The Handbook of Law and Society presents a comprehensive overview of key research findings, theoretical developments, and methodological controversies in the field of law and society. Provides illuminating insights into societal issues that pose ongoing real-world legal problems Offers accessible, succinct overviews with in-depth coverage of each topic, including its evolution, current state, and directions for future research Addresses a wide range of emergent topics in law and society and revisits perennial questions about law in a global world including the widening gap between codified laws and “law in action”, problems in the implementation of legal decisions, law’s constitutive role in shaping society, the importance of law in everyday life, ways legal institutions both embrace and resist change, the impact of new media and technologies on law, intersections of law and identity, law’s relationship to social consensus and conflict, and many more Features contributions from 38 international expert scholars working in diverse fields at the intersections of legal studies and social sciences Unique in its contributions to this rapidly expanding and important new multi-disciplinary field of study

What can law’s popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the ‘cultural legal studies’ movement, which proffers a new encounter with the ‘cultural turn’ in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the ‘law ands’ (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies – storytelling, technology and jurisprudence – the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode. The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text ‘represents’ law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the ‘juridical’ become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law’s popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.

In the present era of internationalisation of law, being able to analyse legal culture enables legal cooperation. However, legal culture is still more a theoretical concept than an analytical tool applied when approaching law. There are many kinds of legal cultures, concerning different groups of legal actors or covering different geographical areas, and they are at times overlapping. However, the national legal culture is still the one that has the largest influence on the everyday life of citizens and the day-to-day work of lawyers. In this book, the editors first theorize on and give practical guidance on how to identify, deconstruct and examine legal culture. Based on a common analytical framework, the editors and a large number of expert contributors explore central institutional and intellectual features of legal culture in 12 European countries next to USA, China and Australia allowing the reader to systematically compare legal cultures.This is the second and extended version of Comparing Legal Cultures, which is the first thorough and extensive book that analyses national legal cultures as an approach to comparative law.