part ii • legal cultures • jørn øyrehagen sunde tural (trans)formation processes depend on what we can label cultural enzymes. They are events, individuals, institutions, and the like which in quantity are insignificant, but in quality are decisive because they make a certain interplay possible. For legal culture, for example, we can ask if a Nordic legal culture would have been possible without the Nordic lawyers meetings from 1872 on?13 Even though they are held only every third year and last only a few days, they were the enzymes that made a Nordic legal culture possible. In all law we find enzymes that make the big difference. The equalization of children regardless of their parents’ marital status would have been unthinkable in Norway in 1915 without the lawyer and politician Johan Castberg. It was because of his efforts that the legal rules were made and applied.14 However, in legal appliance this is unimportant and is hence disregarded. The legal enzymes are a problem for legal appliance, because they do away with some of the law’s authority by adding a flash of arbitrariness. Legal culture can never be monolithic, then. There will always be some ambiguity attached to it from a legal appliance perspective. From a legal analytical perspective, it offers a view of the complexity of law. However, for an analytical approach to legal culture we first need to define legal culture more closely. Legal culture can be defined in various ways. Friedman has been fairly consistent, having first defined it in 1969 as ‘the values and attitudes which bind the [legal] system together.’15 In 1975 he went further, arguing that legal culture was the ‘ideas, values, attitudes and beliefs of a 13 See Johan Bucht, ‘De Nordiska juristmöterna och rättsgemenskapen i Norden’, Defensor Legis 5 (1999), 748–75. 14 Jørn Øyrehagen Sunde, ‘Barnets naturlige ret overfor forældrene: Barnebidragsordninga i norsk rett frå 1763 til dei Castbergske barnelovene i 1915’, in Geir Kjell Andersland (ed.), De Castbergske barnelover 1915–2015 (Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2015), 68–72. 15 Friedman 1969, 34. 128 Legal culture defined and explained
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