part ii • legal cultures • jørn øyrehagen sunde and (vi) internationalization. The two structures and six elements make up the legal cultural model.27 The institutional structure of a legal culture is constituted by the institutions, where law is shaped through different practices. The intellectual structure is also the ideas and expectations of the law that influence the different practices shaping the law. For instance, court decisions and legislation are made according to what is just and fair, and come with a legal method that ensures that the applied law fulfils the ideas and expectations of justice and fairness. What is considered just and fair might vary among professional lawyers and the public; the level of professionalization in the legal system will thus help determine what the ideas and expectations of the law will be. The international influences on the law also influence the ideas and expectations of the law, and hence as legal cultural elements fall under the intellectual structure. The idea behind the legal cultural model is to have a basis for legal cultural analyses. For instance, it is a crucial part of Norwegian legal culture that courts at any level can conduct a judicial review. This means that a single judge in adistrict court can rule that a piece of legislation made by an unanimous Parliament is invalid because it conflicts with the Norwegian Constitution of 1814. This happened in 2008, when a judge in the Oslo District Court concluded that a new rule in the criminal law on genocide conflicted with the prohibition on retroactive legislation in the Constitution.28 The right to judicial review was added to the Constitu27 The legal cultural model is applied in Søren Koch et al. 2017 and in the forthcoming second edition, covering fifteen different legal cultures. I applied the legal cultural model inHøgsteretts historie 1965–2015: At dømme i sidste Instans (Bergen:Fagbokforlaget, 2015); ‘Dissenting votes in the Norwegian Supreme Court 1965–2009: A legal cultural analysis’, Rechtskultur – Zeitschrift für Europäische Rechtsgeschichte 1 (2009), 59–73; ‘Daughters of God and counsellors of the judges of men: A study in changes in the legal culture in the Norwegian realm in the High Middle Ages’, in Stefan Brink et al. (eds.), New Approaches to Early Law in Scandinavia(Turnhout: Brepols, 2014), 131–83; ‘Legal Cultural Dependency of Norwegian Legal Method –and its future’, in Ingvill Helland et al. (eds.), Nordic and Germanic Legal Methods (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 44–70; ‘The History of the Nordic Legal Culture and Court Culture’, in Laura Evro et al. (eds.), Nordic Court Culture (Springer, in press); and ‘Chapter I: Introduction’, in Tina Soleiman Hunter et al. (eds.), The Character of Petroleum Licenses: A Legal Cultural Analysis (Edward Elgar, in press). 28 TOSLO-2008-18985, lovdata.no/dokument/HRENG/avgjorelse/hr-2011-809-a-eng. 132
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