part vi • european legal integration • nina-louisa arold lorenz We start by introducing the concepts of legal culture and legal family, and the empirical research used to examine the legal cultures of the ECtHRand CJEU. Pierre Legrand, in a remarkable article about the irreducible differences between legal families based on different mentalities, wrote ‘it would be like a common law lawyer acting as if he were a civil law lawyer, but he could never be one’.3 Applied in the context of the ECtHRandCJEU, the question becomes whether the variety of individual mentalities provokes conflict on European benches. Legal mentalities are synonymous with legal culture. There are different ways to approach legal culture, for whereas the European approach is to link legal culture to studying legal doctrine, studies from theUStake a broader view. These two approaches are discussed by Roger Cotterrell in a study of legal ideology tied to doctrine.4 Lawrence Friedman, meanwhile, defines legal culture as ‘ideas, values, attitudes and beliefs of a specific group of people towards law’.5 Cotterrell criticized Friedman for too vague a definition that includes non-lawyer perspectives; Friedman countered that common law thinking is that the law is not the preserve of legal experts, but rather a fluid entity that reacts to public demands, and non-legal experts, such as NGOs and interest groups, can very well contribute to legal culture and law.6 Friedman’s definition is especially useful when analysing international organizations, because it is more flexible and open to the inclusion of aspects not linked to doctrine. Legal cultures are deeply rooted in national legal systems. The continent of Europe is rich in history, including a scarring history of war; it has a multitude of languages and religions; and it has many national legal systems. National legal systems were created with the birth of strong na3 Pierre Legrand, ‘European legal systems are not converging’, International & Comparative Law Quarterly 45 (1996), 74. 4 Roger Cotterrell, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture’, in David Nelken (ed.), Comparing Legal Cultures (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 13, 15 ff. 5 Lawrence M. Friedman, The Legal System: A Social Science Perspective (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975), 223. 6 Lawrence M. Friedman, ‘The Concept of Legal Culture: A Reply’, in Nelken 1997, 34 300 Methodology
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