Legal culture

Legal cultures are described as being temporary outcomes of interactions and occur pursuant to a challenge and response paradigm. Analyses of core legal paradigms shape the characteristics of individual and distinctive legal cultures. "Comparative legal cultures are examined by a field of scholarship, which is situated at the line bordering comparative law and historical jurisprudence."

Lawrence M. Friedman's definition of legal culture is that it is "the network of values and attitudes relating to law, which determines when and why and where people turn to law or government, or turn away."

Legal cultures can be examined by reference to fundamentally different legal systems. However, such cultures can also be differentiated between systems with a shared history and basis which are now otherwise influenced by factors that encourage cultural change. Students learn about legal culture in order to better understand how the law works in society. This can be seen as the study of Law and Society. These studies are available at schools such as Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.

Western legal culture is unified in the systematic reliance on legal constructs. Such constructs include corporations, contracts, estates, rights and powers. These concepts are not only nonexistent in primitive or traditional legal systems but they can also be predominately incapable of expression in those language systems which form the basis of such legal cultures.

As a general proposition, the concept of legal culture depends on language and symbols and any attempt to analyze non-western legal systems in terms of categories of modern western law can result in distortion attributable to differences in language. So while legal constructs are unique to classical Roman, modern civil and common law cultures, legal concepts or primitive and archaic law get their meaning from sensed experience based on facts as opposed to theory or abstract. Legal culture therefore in the former group is influenced by academics, learned members of the profession and historically, philosophers. The latter group's culture is harnessed by beliefs, values and religion at a foundational level.

Historical studies of European 'cultures of law' have focused on the problem of explaining the context in which law operates, and how to understand the expectations and perceptions of law, justice and authority among the members of different groups who made use of legal norms, tools and fora.

Traditional law in Africa is based on natural justice and lacks abstract concepts. This is characteristic of cultures that have an absence of written language, which is necessary to elaborate concepts into theory. The doctrines of traditional African law are based on social considerations whereby parties to disputes seek not declarations of right or wrong but rather they seek restitution of social relationships.

The trier of fact and law adjudicates between closely related people from communities as opposed to strangers in commerce. Judgments stress the importance of living together in generous, loving kindness, mutual helpfulness and reciprocity. Evidence suggests that 'African law demonstrates that all men, because they live in society, have some theory of rules of justice which they believe arise from reason itself; [and Gluckman's evidence] suggests that Africans may well have formulated, in embryonic form at least, a theory of natural justice coming from human kindness itself.'