legal culture as a tool for legal analysis I later realized it was due in part to our different perspectives on legal culture: the student viewed the appliance of legal norms in isolation while I saw it in a context. I have also experienced similar conflicts of perspectives on other occasions, and have concluded that it stands in the way of a more frequent use of legal culture as an analytical tool. Legal culture is an analytical tool with which to put jus strictumin a legal context. This is an act of making law thicker. It is hence different from legal appliance, which is all about making law slim. The vagueness of legal culture arises primarily from its being viewed from a legal appliance perspective. The same perspective is found in legal science, since it is partly about making law slim enough for appliance. I will not exclude that legal culture can sometimes be used as an interpretive instrument during the appliance of law. However, I would argue that legal culture rarely is used, and definitely not best used, in this manner. Instead, the legal cultural perspective best serves law when applied before, and not during, the appliance of law. What seems to be a vagueness of legal culture from the appliance perspective is a cultural contextualization of law from an analytical perspective. First, there are always many variations in a culture. To identify differences and commonalities, you have to abstract beyond the individual. However, what level should the abstractions settle on? On a low level of generalization, there are different legal cultures within a single country. In a Norwegian context it is taken for granted that the Samí, the indigenous population in central and northern Norway, have their own specific legal culture next to the more general Norwegian one.9 On a higher level, you find national legal cultures, regional, continental, and in the end – on a high level of abstraction – all legal cultures in the world have common features. Such common features would for instance be thirdparty intervention in conflict resolution. This open question when it comes to the level of abstraction is often disturbing to lawyers. In many lawyers’ minds, the ideal law is still national, even after a couple of decades with the strong influence of inter9 See Solem 1931. 125
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