This collection considers how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice. Comparative in analysis, this study places particular cases in their widest context, taking into account international and transnational influences.

Legal Practice and Cultural Diversity considers how contemporary cultural and religious diversity challenges legal practice, how legal practice responds to that challenge, and how practice is changing in the encounter with the cultural diversity occasioned by large-scale, post-war immigration. Locating actual practices and interpretations which occur in jurisprudence and in public discussion, this volume examines how the wider environment shapes legal processes and is in turn shaped by them. In so doing, the work foregrounds a number of themes principally relating to changing norms and practices and sensitivity to cultural and religious difference in the application of the law. Comparative in approach, this study places particular cases in their widest context, taking into account international and transnational influences on the way in which actors, legal and other, respond.

"This book is a mix of policy, legal history, professionalism, and lawyering skills. It asks readers to explore multiculturalism through several different lenses. First, readers explore the reasons behind calls for diversity in the legal profession, examining how ordinary people view the culture of the law. Next, readers explore their own cultural backgrounds, consider implicit bias, and examine how to best navigate their own cultures as they interact with legal systems. Then, readers examine how to best represent clients with a particular focus on understanding client goals and helping translate client values and culture into legal system values and culture, while always cognizant of their own values and cultures. Finally, readers explore case studies where failure to appreciate culture has had critical consequences. The book provides perspective through essays about multicultural values in legal systems in other countries. It can be used as a textbook in a multicultural lawyering course or seminar, in a professional identity and culture course, or as a supplement to a clinic, skills, or doctrinal course. Lawyers and other legal professionals can use this book to explore multiculturalism and its effects in the legal system"--

The UNESCO Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (CDCE) was adopted in 2005 and designed to allow States to protect and promote cultural policies. This book examines the effectiveness of the CDCE and offers ways by which its implementation may be improved to better attain its objectives. The book provides insight in how the normative character of the CDCE may be strengthened through implementation and increasingly recurrent practice based on its provisions. Hailing from various fields of international law, political and social sciences, the book’s contributors work to promote discussions on the practical and legal influence of the CDCE, and to identify opportunities and recommendations for a more effective application. Part One of the book assesses the effectiveness of the CDCE in influencing other areas of international law and the work conducted by other intergovernmental organizations through the recognition of the double nature (cultural and economic) of cultural goods and services. Part Two focuses on the practice of the CDCE beyond the recognition of the specificity of cultural goods and services in international law by addressing the CDCE’s call for greater international cooperation and stronger integration of cultural concerns in development strategies at the national and regional levels. The book will be of great use and interest to academics and practitioners in law, social and political sciences, agents of governmental and international organizations, and cultural sector stakeholders.

With regard to family law, this volume examines claims based on cultural tradition, ethnic background, custom, religious affiliation and sexual orientation, as well as various other “claims” that are not officially recognized in state law, in 15 jurisdictions around the world. The country reports seek to determine whether these claims represent a challenge to family law as conceived by the state, and if so, how these challenges are being managed. The focus lies on the interaction between (i) claims and traditions raising minority-related and diversity-related issues and (ii) the state as the addressee of these demands for accommodation. The reports identify specific instances and situations that have proven (and in many cases still are) particularly difficult to resolve. They force decision-makers to engage in a delicate balancing act between different, often clashing interests.

A collection on cultural law that demonstrates efficacy of comparative, international, and indigenous law in the context of culture-related issues.

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.