Year: 2017
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter concerns two distinct but related ways in which legal culture intersects with more general social norms, including those norms reflected in popular culture. In the first place, legal culture acts as an intervening variable, a mechanism for transforming norms of popular culture into legal dress and shape. In the second place, legal and popular culture, as images of each other, help explicate and illuminate their respective contents. The chapter also examines some instances of popular legal culture. Social theories assume some sort of meaningful boundary—conceptual or analytical—between law and not-law; between the legal and the social; but these theories also conceive of this boundary as wholly or largely porous, a kind of network or meshwork through which energy easily flows, rather than as a tough, tight skin. Social theories are mighty tools for grappling with problems of explanation. They are not infected irremediably with a disease called "behaviorism.".
Source: Routledge eBooks
Author: Lawrence M. Friedman
Institution: Stanford University
Language: English
Topic: Law in Society and Culture
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W5193049