Comparing Legal Cultures

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 of the 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.