legal culture as a tool for legal analysis specific group of people towards law’.16 In 1986 he thought it ‘popular ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions, regarding law, legal systems, and legal institutions’, and by 1990 had rephrased it as ‘ideas, attitudes, values, and opinions about law, the legal system, and legal institutions in some given population.’17 This last can be taken as representative of the whole tradition of legal cultural research which followed on Friedman’s groundbreaking work, with its emphasis on mentalities and what we could call the ideas and expectations of law.18 However, in 1969 Friedman linked legal culture to the structure and substance of the law. The structural element of law is ‘the institutions themselves, the forms they take, the process that they perform’; the substance of law is ‘the output side of the legal system.’19 Institutions do not make up legal culture, but strengthen any legal cultural notions the actors in the institution bring in or which it encounters in dialogue with the rest of the legal community and society. Think of groups of people being like the sun, which can give a sense of what time it is, while an institution is a clock, which exists to show the exact time. Lawmaking and law-applying institutions such as parliaments, departments of justice, and the judiciary thus shape our ideas and expectations of the law. That said, remember that no institution is ever a self-actor; it always consists of people who act on its behalf and in its name. The strength of institutions thus lies in their ability to perform specific tasks with efficiency and to forcefully promote the end result. The end result is what we can call practice, and is the manifestation of the values and attitudes in and towards law. It is hard to produce common values and attitudes without sharing and debating them with others. This 16 Lawrence M. Friedman, The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (New York: Russell Sage Foundation 1975), 223. 17 Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘Total Justice: Law, culture, and Society’, Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts &Sciences 40/3 (1986), 28; see also id., ‘Law, Lawyers and Popular Culture’, Yale Law Journal 98/8 (1989), 1579, citing id., Total Justice (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1985); id., ‘Some Thoughts on Comparative Legal Culture’, in David S. Clark (ed.), Comparative and Private International Law: Essays in Honor of John Henry Merryman on his Seventieth Birthday (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1990), 53. 18 See the discussion in Cotterrell 2019, 720–4. 19 Friedman 1969, 34. 129
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