part ii • legal cultures • jørn øyrehagen sunde national law, whether UNlaw, transnational law such as the European Human Rights and EUlaw, or focusing on local custom, as in the ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples. National law as the ideal law arises from the desire for unified law, which promotes predictability and equality. However, we must not confuse the appliance of law with the analysis of law. Even if different levels of law can pose a problem when finding and applying a legal rule, it can be useful when putting legal rules and other legal material in context. The fact there is individual use in every language, and that all languages have common traits, does not keep us from speaking of different languages: we are aware that Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish all have dialects, and that they all belong to the group of Scandinavian languages. Norwegian legal culture or Nordic legal culture are categories constructed to make sense of the law, just we are able to analyse a Norwegian dialect, the Norwegian language, or Scandinavian languages as constructs made for communicative and analytical purposes.10 Characterized by their variations though they are, cultures always overlap. The members of one culture can be members of other cultures. Being bicultural is at least as common as being bilingual. A Sámi lawyer will be embedded in a Sámi legal culture, the legal culture of the nation they are operating in, and in aEuropean legal culture, just as a Samí might speak one of the Samí languages and Norwegian as their mother tongue and English as a foreign language. However, the overlaps are also disturbing for lawyers because of the fundamental demand of law that one legal question should have only one legal solution. The continuous, stringent systematization of law since the High Middle Ages can be viewed as a quest for singular law by doing away with the overlaps. However, we have again to differentiate between legal appliance and legal analysis. That Samí custom overlaps with Norwegian national legislation and offers a different solution to the same 10 We have to speak of a Nordic legal culture and a Scandinavian language group, since Finland is one of the Nordic countries but Finnish is not a Scandinavian – not even a Germanic – language. The same is true of Iceland, because Icelandic, while a modern Scandinavian language, is not understandable to the others in the group. 126
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