Fagbokforlaget Comparing Legal Cultures: Revised and Extended 2nd Edition

The changes in communication technology have hugely increased the interaction over geographical distances; hence given rise to new kinds of social relations in need of legal regulation by transnational law - law valid across the jurisdictional borders ofthe nation state, and applied within. Law is therefore no longer mainly a national matter, and without an understanding of different legal cultures, the perception of the contemporary legal order will be incomplete. In the present era of internationalisation of law, the purpose of applying legal culture as an analytical tool is, in short, to make different notions of law and how law operates in society understandable to such an extent that they do not form obstacles for cooperation. This approach to legal culture takes it out of a purely academic setting and into the legal world outside the ivory tower. This means taking legal culture out of books and into action. This book aims at supplying the reader with tools to operationalize legal cultural knowledge in the everyday operations of law. In other words, the book you hold in your hands right now is produced with the ambition of managing the unmanageable concept of legal culture, and by this making it applicable when deciding the content 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. Autorid: Soren Koch, Jorgen Oyrehagen Sunde