Evocative and stimulating, engaging and timely, this small volume makes sense of the complicated and reciprocal relationship between law and culture. It starts with various definitions of law and the factors that anthropologists consider when they compare legal systems. Next, the experiences of exemplary researchers throughout history and some of the methods they used in their discoveries are discussed. Readers learn how to employ the comparative method and build a typology based on the source of a particular law by putting the world’s legal system into one of three categories: Western law, religious law, and traditional law. The book also tackles important issues such as formal law versus informal law, using law to legitimize power, and clashing values within a single legal system. Examples from fieldwork experiences and historical events offer readers a chance to see how a method has been applied or a concept developed—as well as how law and culture are intertwined in the real world.

Divided into three parts, this book examines the relationship between law and culture from various perspectives, both theoretical and empirical. Part I outlines the framework for further considerations and includes new, innovative conceptualizations of two ideas that are essential to the topic of law and culture: legal culture and customary law. Both of these reappear later in the more empirically oriented chapters of Parts II and III. Part II includes chapters on the relationships between law, customs, and culture, drawing heavily on the tradition and achievements of the anthropology of law and touching on important problems of multiculturalism, legal pluralism, and cultural defense. It focuses on the more intangible meaning of culture, while Part III addresses its more material, tangible aspects and the issue of cultural production, as well as its intersection with law.

This book explores recent developments in the concept of hybridity through a multi-disciplinary perspective, bringing ideas about legal plurality together with the fields of peace, development and cultural studies. Analysing the concepts of hybridity and hybridization, their history, their application in law and legal studies, and their implications for thinking and rethinking legal plurality, the book shows how the concept of hybridity can contribute to an understanding of the processes that occur when different normative or legal orders or frameworks confront each other.

Marine Environmental Governance: From International Law to Local Practice considers the relationship between international environmental law and community-based management of marine areas. Focusing on small island states, in which indigenous populations have to a large extent continued to maintain traditional lifestyles, this book takes up the question of how indigenous customary law and state-based legislation can be reconciled in the implementation of international environmental law. Including a range of case studies, as well as detailed comparative analysis, it pursues an interdisciplinary approach to legal pluralism 'in practice' that will be of considerable interest to environmental lawyers, legal anthropologists, conservation biologists and those working in the area of community-based conservation.

This book presents a distinctive approach to the study of law in society, focusing on the sociological interpretation of legal ideas. It surveys the development of connections between legal studies and social theory and locates its approach in relation to sociolegal studies on the one hand and legal philosophy on the other. It is suggested that the concept of law must be re-considered. Law has to be seen today not just as the law of the nation state, or international law that links nation states, but also as transnational law in many forms. A legal pluralist approach is not just a matter of redefining law in legal theory; it also recognizes that law's authority comes from a plurality of diverse, sometimes conflicting, social sources. The book suggests that the social environment in which law operates must also be rethought, with many implications for comparative legal studies. The nature and boundaries of culture become important problems, while the concept of multiculturalism points to the cultural diversity of populations and to problems of fragmentation, or perhaps to new kinds of unity of the social. Theories of globalization raise a host of issues about the integrity of societies and about the need to understand social networks and forces that extend beyond the political societies of nation states. Through a range of specific studies, closely interrelated and building on each other, the book seeks to integrate the sociology of law with other kinds of legal analysis and engages directly with current juristic debates in legal theory and comparative law.

What are the consequences when law's stories and images migrate from the courtroom to the court of public opinion and from movie, television and computer screens back to electronic monitors inside the courtroom itself? What happens when lawyers and public relations experts market notorious legal cases and controversial policy issues as if they were just another commodity? What is the appropriate relationship between law and digital culture in virtual worlds on the Internet? In addressing these cutting edge issues, the essays in this volume shed new light on the current status and future fate of law, truth and justice in our time.

The concept of culture is troublingly vague and, at the same time, hotly contested, and law's relations to culture are as complex, varied and disputed as the concept of culture itself. The concept of the traditional, unified, reified, civilizing idea of culture has come under attack. The growth of cultural studies has played an important role in redefining culture by including popular culture and questions of social stratification, power and social conflict. Law and legal studies are relative latecomers to cultural studies. As scholars have come to see law as not something apart from culture and society, they have begun to explore the connections between law and culture. Focusing on the production, interpretation, consumption and circulation of legal meaning, these scholars suggest that law is inseparable from the interests, goals and understandings that deeply shape or compromise social life. Against this background, Law in the Domains of Culture brings the insights and approaches of cultural studies to law and tries to secure for law a place in cultural analysis. This book provides a sampling of significant theoretical issues in the cultural analysis of law and illustrates some of those issues in provocative examples of the genre. Law in the Domains of Culture is designed to encourage the still tentative efforts to forge a new interdisciplinary synthesis, cultural studies of law. The contributors are Carol Clover, Rosemary Coombe, Marjorie Garber, Thomas R. Kearns, William Miller, Andrew Ross, Austin Sarat, and Martha Woodmansee. Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a ‘must read’ that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture & Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law’s representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities & the Arts, Australian National University, Australia

Iran has one of the highest rates of road traffic accidents worldwide and according to a recent UNICEF report, the current rate of road accidents in Iran is 20 times more than the world average. Using extensive interviews with a variety of Iranians from a range of backgrounds, this book explores their dangerous driving habits and the explanations for their disregard for traffic laws. It argues that Iranians' driving behaviour is an indicator of how they have historically related to each other and to their society at large, and how they have maintained a form of social order through law, culture and religion. By considering how ordinary Iranians experience the traffic problem in their cities and how they describe traffic rules, laws, authorities and the rights of other citizens, Driving Culture in Iran provides an original and valuable insight into Iranian legal, social and political culture.