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Published in:
Legal Cultures: Combining Diversity and Structure Read chapter Read first chapter

2023 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Legal Culture: Ideas of and Expectations to Law Made Operational by Institutional(-Like) Practices

Author : Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde

Published in: Handbook on Legal Cultures

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter discusses the notion of legal culture, its relationship with communication and its use from an appliance and analytical point of view. The importance of context is emphasised and illustrated by a picture of legal culture as a legal sea with different layers that are in constant interaction. Based on these initial observations, the definition and purpose of the operationalised concept of legal culture used in this volume are developed. By transferring this concept into an analytical model—the legal cultural model—with six elements, the chapter creates the theoretical foundation for the structure of the individual chapters in this book. It explains the function, merits but also limitations of the legal cultural model illustrated by examples taken from the Norwegian legal culture.

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previous chapter Legal Cultures: Combining Diversity and Structure
next chapter An Introduction to Australian Legal Culture
Footnotes
1
I will draw upon several examples from the Norwegian legal culture, which I am most familiar with, throughout the article. For a more detailed overview, see Kjølstad et al. (this volume).
 
2
Holmøyvik (2015), pp. 334–335.
 
3
Boucht (1999).
 
4
Sunde (2015a), pp. 68–72.
 
5
Tuori (2002).
 
6
See the brief overview in Andreas (1991) as well as Harsgor (1978).
 
7
Wieacker (1990).
 
8
Zweigert and Kötz (1998), p. 68.
 
9
Van Hoecke and Warrington (1998).
 
10
Van Damm (2009).
 
11
The presentation of the legal cultural model was first presented in Sunde (2010).
 
12
See Friedman (1975), pp. 223–224 and Friedman (1989), but also Gibson and Caldeira (1996).
 
13
See Cotterrell (2019), p. 718.
 
14
Eckhoff and Sundby (1991), p. 45.
 
15
See Friedman (1989), pp. 1583–1584.
 
16
But see Sunde (2021), pp. 136–140.
 
17
This presentation of the usefulness of the Legal Cultural Model in practice is taken from Sunde (2014b).
 
18
Lindheim and Others v Norway App no 13221/08 and 2139/10 (ECtHR, 12 June 2012).
 
19
Rt. 2007 p. 1281 and Rt. 2007 p. 1306.
 
20
The preparatory works consist of all the official documents that prepare the ground for a new piece of legislation.
 
21
Helland (2012), pp. 411–412.
 
22
Rt. 2007 p. 1281.
 
23
Here quoted from Lindheim and Others v Norway, para. 16.
 
24
Reelle hensyn literally means “actual considerations” and includes a whole group of different kinds of arguments, the function of which in Norwegian law today is to secure a fair outcome of the case. See further in Kjølstad et al. (this volume), Sect. 4.3.
 
25
1996 is chosen as a breaking point since the criminal procedure was changed by law. Since 1996, the Norwegian Supreme Court has decided about an equal number of civil and criminal cases every year; prior to this, the Court would decide more than three times the number of criminal cases.
 
26
In 1997, 1999, 2001, 2004, and 2007, the Norwegian Supreme Court made such explicit references to fairness in more than 10% of the cases it decided, while this was done in less than 5% of the cases in 2008 and 2010.
 
27
Sunde (2015b), pp. 291–292. If we also include references to value-based assessments in the introductory part of the Supreme Court decisions, the numbers are 70 out of 1361 criminal cases and 342 out of 1377 civil cases.
 
28
Mathisen (2010), p. 203.
 
Literature
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Sunde JØ (2021) Legal culture as a tool for legal analysis. In: Modéer KÅ, Hirschfedt J (eds) Legal history. Reflecting the past and the present current perspectives for the future. Institutet för Rättshistorisk Forskning, Stockholm, pp 122–141
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Metadata
Title
Legal Culture: Ideas of and Expectations to Law Made Operational by Institutional(-Like) Practices
Author
Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde
Copyright Year
2023
Book
Handbook on Legal Cultures

Print ISBN: 978-3-031-27744-3

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-27745-0

Copyright Year: 2023

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27745-0_2