LS1532: FOUNDATIONS OF LEGAL CULTURAL COMPARISON (2025-2026)

Law is often seen from one’s own jurisdictional or cultural standpoint. Consistent with the overall aims of the programme, this course seeks to introduce students to a comparative method whereby they may begin to understand the different cultural frameworks within which law operates and legal sources can be handled. ‘Legal culture’ here is understood as ideas and expectations made operational by institutional practices. Broadly, students will be asked to think of legal cultures not simply in terms of institutions of conflict resolution (e.g. courts) and norm producers (e.g. legislatures) but also as being shaped by factors made operational through those institutions (e.g. ideals of justice, legal methods and approaches to legal professionalisation). The use of such a ‘cultural’ model as a tool of legal analysis – originally developed by Professor Jørn Sunde of Oslo University – has been applied with great success for many years in Norwegian Law Faculties (see Handbook on Legal Cultures: A Selection of the World's Legal Cultures | SpringerLink).

Students will explore how such legal cultural ideas operate at the levels of individual jurisdictions, the state and the international order. They will also come to understand how such cultural ideas shape different ways of producing legal norms and both formal and informal sources of law (e.g. legislation, precedent and juristic opinion). At the same time, they will develop the methodological skills required to handle such sources of law, both in lectures and in tutorials.

The lectures will begin by introducing students to some fundamentals of comparative law. They will consider a range of basic questions. What is comparison in general, what is necessary for comparison to generate meaningful information, and what is comparative law? They will then be introduced to the important question of how one establishes an appropriate tertium comparationis. Students will the consider to various different approaches to comparison, including functionalism. At the same time, they will learn some of the difficulties involved in the taxonomic classification of legal orders, whether into families, traditions or through other devices. They will then consider Sunde’s legal cultural model in detail. Students will be asked to apply their knowledge and understanding of Sunde’s legal cultural model in the first tutorial.

Students will then consider the legal cultural model in operation in subsequent lectures. It will be applied to a range of different global legal cultures, relying in part on the detailed information in the Handbook on Legal Cultures mentioned above. The selection of the cultures will try to avoid the traditional model of finding cultures that represent the major legal families of the world; this has been shown to exclude many legal voices across the world that do not fit into the traditional (often Euro-centric) categories. In the second tutorial, students will be asked to prepare detailed comparisons of two or three legal cultures for discussion.

Having seen how the legal cultural model operates, students will then be asked to compare different aspects of different cultures in detail – e.g. they will be asked to consider why legal methodologies differ so widely across the world, with reference to other factors captured in Sunde’s legal cultural model. Lectures will explain, for example, how codified systems often pay considerable attention to principles of statutory interpretation, more so than systems that use precedent, in which one must learn methods of reasoning from precedent to precedent (e.g. by identifying the ratio decidendi of a past decision). Reference will also be made to the differing roles jurists and legal scholars play in different legal systems, and the cultural reasons for those divergences. The third tutorial will build on this knowledge, asking students to consider different mechanisms of norm production – e.g. statute, codes and precedents – and to analyse these sources using the legal cultural model.

Information on contact teaching time is available from the course guide.

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There are no assessments for this course.