Law as Culture: An Invitation

by Lawrence Rosen

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture , Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the facts that are adduced in a legal forum connect to the ways in which facts are constructed in other areas of everyday life, how the processes of legal decision-making partake of the logic by which the culture as a whole is put together, and how courts, mediators, or social pressures fashion a sense of the world as consistent with common sense and social identity.


While the book explores issues comparatively, in each instance it relates them to contemporary Western experience. The development of the jury and Continental legal proceedings thus becomes a story of the development of Western ideas of the person and time; African mediation techniques become tests for the style and success of similar efforts in America and Europe; the assertion that one's culture should be considered as an excuse for a crime becomes a challenge to the relation of cultural norms and cultural diversity.


Throughout the book, the reader is invited to approach law afresh, as a realm that is integral to every culture and as a window into the nature of culture itself.

Genres: Anthropology, Law

232 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2006

About the author

Lawrence Rosen is the Cromwell Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University and adjunct professor of law at Columbia Law School and a 2005 Carnegie Scholar. He is both an anthropologist and a lawyer. His main interests are in the relation between cultural concepts and their implementation in social and legal relationships

He is the author of The Culture of Islam; Varieties of Muslim Experience; Bargaining For Reality; and Two Arabs, a Berber, and a Jew; all also published by the University of Chicago Press.

He teaches courses on law and anthropology, comparative religious systems, the American Indian and the law, and the theory of cultural systems. He received the Presidential Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997 and was a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar for 1997-98.

Reviews

[Dylan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing effort to introduce the anthropology of law. It's a massive topic--after all, what even is "law"? Rosen's solution is the classic anthropologist's device: bop around time and space, breezily contrasting "some traditional African..." "medieval Christians," "Muslims in North Africa," "many tribes in New Guinea," "the British conception," and so on. Serious topics like colonialism vis-a-vis indigenous peoples in the Americas or South Asians vs. the British are evoked in an almost jaunty manner. There are so many interesting ideas to pursue here--the making of "facts," the role of power, questions of relationality--and yet, the result is scattered and unsatisfying.