legal culture as a tool for legal analysis wegian newspapers were few and far between, but thereafter there were 63 in 1945, 27 in 1946, 60 in 1947, 117 in 1948, 62 in 1949, and 55 in 1950, before falling away – not until the past decade have references to legal culture in Norwegian newspapers come close to the frequency of even the 1930s.47 If we look beyond the numbers, we see that the postwar rise was linked first to the prosecution of collaborators and then to the War Act of 1950. These were formative debates in post-war Norway, when divides had to be bridged. The references to legal culture in Norwegian newspapers lack the analytical features the term can have, and that has been a major theme so far in this essay. It is important to acknowledge that legal culture can be used in legal analyses. However, the term is not purely legal or analytical, and is not only for those who operate in an internal legal culture – the legal culture created by contributions from professional legal actors. Legal culture is also a term for all citizens, making up the external legal culture, that we can label the lay or popular legal culture.48 The debate in Norwegian newspapers in the late 1940s indicates that legal culture is also a term with which to express ownership and the ideas and expectations to the law for those who are not professional legal actors. Such statements on legal culture can be analysed in their own right. However, their social and political function are maybe more important than their legal function, because they open up for a different kind of dialogue about the law that law depends on in order to be in sync with society. 141 47 Nasjonalbiblioteket (National Library of Norway), Oslo, www.nb.no, s.v. ‘rettskultur*’. 48 Friedman 1989; Cotterrell 2019, 718.
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