Legal culture

Legal culture is a concept in comparative law and historical jurisprudence describing the network of values, attitudes and practices that shape how a given society relates to law, generally arising as the outcome of an ongoing pattern of challenge and response among a legal system's core paradigms. The legal scholar Lawrence M. Friedman defined legal culture as the network of values and attitudes relating to law that determines when, why and where people turn to law or government, or turn away from it. Scholars study legal culture both by comparing fundamentally different legal systems and by comparing systems that share a common history but have since been shaped by different forces of cultural change, an approach associated with the Law and Society field, which examines how law actually functions within a society rather than only how it is written. Legal cultures vary widely: Western legal systems rely on systematic constructs such as corporations, contracts and estates that are largely absent from many non-Western traditions, which instead ground legal reasoning in belief, custom and religion. Traditional African law, for example, emphasizes natural justice and the restoration of social relationships over abstract declarations of rights, while Islamic legal systems integrate religious knowledge and human nature as organizing principles distinct from Western procedural forms.