lawrence m. friedman in interview that two political scientists, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba, had written a book calledCivic Culture.7 In that book they defined political culture as the ideas, the attitudes, and the expectations people have on political subjects. I said to myself, if so, then there is also such a thing as legal culture, and that’s how I used the term. But others have used the term in other ways. In many ways I think it’s an unfortunate phrase, because people misunderstand it; I use it simply to mean ideas, opinions, attitudes, and expectations about law. Other people use it with a different meaning, and that creates a great deal of confusion.8 Everything I have done has rested on the assumption that law is a dependent variable; that the social context, which includes political opinion, political forces, the economic system and other factors, determine the law, and not the other way around. Law is not autonomous. It’s a product of social forces, and everything I do is based on that axiomatic assumption. The legal culture is part of my programme. If you study US history, you can’t avoid race. You can’t avoid the AfroAmerican, the Chinese in California, and the other minorities; they have been central to the law and central to society. In my History of American Lawwhich I first published in 1973 I have a chapter which deals with women. I’m not saying I was the first, certainly not, to stress the role of women, but I did pay attention to gender. Inmy legal history work, I have 7 Gabriel Almond & Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton: PUP, 1963). 8 For the discussion, see Roger Cotterrell, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture’, and Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture: A Reply’, in David Nelken (ed.), Comparing Legal Cultures (Aldershot: Dartmouth 1997), 13–32, 33–40; Roger Cotterrell, ‘Is there a logic of Legal Transplants’, and Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘Some Comments on Cotterrell and Legal Transplants’, in David Nelken & Johannes Feest (Oxford: Hart, 2001), 70–92, 93–8; LawrenceM. Friedman, ‘Is there a Modern Legal Culture?, Ratio Juris7 (1994), 117– 31. 9 Lawrence M. Friedman & Robert V. Percival (eds.), The Roots of Justice: Crime and Punishment in Alameda County, California, 1870–1910(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Lawrence M. Friedman & Rogelio Pérez-Perdomo (eds.), Legal Culture in the Age of Globalization: Latin America and Latin Europe (Stanford: SUP, 2003). 111 But you are also interested in the racial minorities in the United States, in Alameda County and elsewhere.9
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