legal culture as a tool for legal analysis lost. Culture is nothing that exists a priori: it is created, upheld, changed, and lost with interaction. Four modes of interaction are interesting when studying legal culture. The first is between people who share the space of the world with each other, the second is between people in the past and in the present, and the third is between people and institutions, and to this we can add interaction with nature. It is at the crossroads between these four modes of interaction that ideas and expectations of the law are shaped through institutional and institution-like practices. Plainly, interactions between people sharing the world will shape legal culture. Judges meeting every day in a court building, meeting regularly as the presidents of administrative courts or of the Consultative Council of Judiciaries of Europe, or at the Nordic lawyers meetings, are all events that on different levels contribute to the creation of common ideas and expectations of law. Listening to or reading lawyers’ argumentation in actual cases, listening to speeches, and reading journal articles and books on different legal topics are other examples of direct and indirect interactions that contribute to the same process. However, we must not get lost in the internal legal interactions. Next to the internal legal culture, there is also an external legal culture, little investigated in the literature, but nevertheless the lay or popular legal culture shared by legal subjects.40 Especially Norwegian legal culture, with a tradition of lay participation, has been and still is shaped by the interactionwith the ideas and expectations of the law in society at large. The law, remember, is not a closed system, shut off from the society it regulates. Discussions of the law in the media, everyday conversations: it all contributes to the interaction that shapes ideas and expectations of the law.41 137 Øyrehagen Sunde & Knut Einar Skodvin (eds.), Rendezvous of European Legal Cultures (Bergen: Fagbokforlaget, 2010), 183–93. 40 For the external culture, see Friedman 1975, 223–4; Friedman 1989; also James L. Gibson & Gregory A. Caldeira, ‘The Legal Cultures of Europe’, Law& Society Review30/1 (1996), 58. For the popular response, see Roger Cotterrell, ‘Comparative law and legal culture’, in Mathias Reimann & Reinhard Zimmermann (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Law(Oxford: OUP, 2019), 718. 41 Torstein Eckhoff & Nils Christian Sundby, Rettssystemer: Systemteoretisk innføring i rettsfilosofien(Oslo: Tano, 1991), 45; see Friedman 1989, 1583–4.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjYyNDk=