Comparing Legal Cultures

This volume cross-examines mainstream approaches to studying legal culture (e.g. those of Friedman and Blankenburg). It includes debates over the concept of legal culture and a variety of case studies of different legal cultures.

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.

These essays on comparative legal cultures look at topics such as the roots and alternatives of Western legal culture, common law and civil law, variations for cultures of law, comparative legal methods, legal cultures in co-existence and conflict, and degenaration of legal cultures.

This exciting collection looks at the theory and practice of legal borrowing and adaptation in different areas of the world: Europe,the USA and Latin America, S.E. Asia and Japan. Many of the contributors focus on fundamental theoretical issues. What are legal transplants? What is the role of the state in producing socio-legal change? What are the conditions of successful legal transfers? How is globalisation changing these conditions? Such problems are also discussed with reference to substantive and specific case studies. When and why did Japanese rules of product liability come into line with those of the EU and the USA? How and why did judicial review come late to the legal systems of Holland and Scandinavia? Why is the present wave of USA-influenced legal reforms in Latin Amercia apparently having more success than the previous round? How does competition between the legal and accountancy professions affect patterns of bankruptcy? The chapters in this volume, which include a comprehensive theoretical introduction, offer a range of valuable insights even if they also show that the

Comparative legal studies are at last commanding the thoughts of contemporary jurists� Alice ES Tay. Drawing on an impressive ancestry in comparative law, the 22 contributions in this volume by authors from Asia, Australia and Europe go further in their complex conception of law and culture. They look at the new principles and concepts of a transnational, global law in new, multiple contexts and in diverse juxtapositions with new institutions and authorities. In an unplanned but cohesive pattern the individual contributions together open a fresh vision of the use and value of comparative legal studies for the assessment of the function and limitations of the law of a global society.

This is a collection of essays on general and specific topics of comparative private and comparative public law by distinguished legal scholars from every part of the world in honour to the work of Alice Ehr-Soon Tay. The essays demonstrate the changing approach to common law in legal culture and present a body of texts on comparative law problems arching from Asia to Europe to Australia. The volume furthermore indicates that there is no area where comparative law has proved more dominant and useful than in regard to human rights and comparative constitutional analysis. Finally, this book is an outstanding cross-cultural contribution to comparative private law and comparative constitutional law in terms of understanding legal culture and law. It will be invaluable to all those who practise, teach or judge law. Articles by Kim Santow, Saul Fridman, W. M. C. Gummow, J. A. Jolowicz, Hiroshi Matsuo, Ivan Shearer, Christopher Birch, Tom Campbell, Roland Drago, Jennifer Hill, Michael Kirby, Karin Lemercier, Aleksander Peczenik, Robert S. Summers, Albert H.Y. Chen, Jianfu Chen, Edward McWhinney, Eric Smithburn, Klaus A. Ziegert, Margaret Allars, Han Depei, Guenther Doeker-Mach, Hoang Van Hao, Tommy Koh, Adam Lopatka, Gabriel A. Moens, Cao Duc Thai, Wang Gungwu, Peter Wesley-Smith, Murray Gleeson, Julia Horne List of Publications of Alice Erh-Soon-Tay .