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2 Int'l J. L. Context 1 (2006)

handle is hein.journals/injwcext2 and id is 1 raw text is: International Journal of Law in Context, 2,1 pp. i-i0 (2006) Cambridge University Press DOI: 0.c017/SI7445523r600-117 Printed in the United Kingdom Culture, comparison, community Roger Cotterrell* Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London Abstract This article proposes a response to legal scholarship's recent concerns with the complexity of law's relations with culture, looked at from a sociolegal point of view. It argues that legal studies today must have a comparative dimension, and that they should contribute to an understanding oflaw in relation to culture, or as a cultural phenomenon. But there are problems with culture as a legal concept (or a social scientific one). Also, many long-established sociolegal ideas about 'law and society' are becoming obsolete. A way forward is to relate law to four pure types of community that interact in complex ways in social life and, together, embrace the various dimensions of culture. The article claims that a law- and-community approach to legal study clarifies law's relation to culture, and provides a framework for comparative studies of law. i. Culture What can an English legal scholar, with an almost entirely European social and legal experience, hope to contribute to a realistic discussion of legal studies in a country with a profoundly different culture - for example, India? The challenge is to try to find a way of bridging cultures through legal and social theory, legal and sociological scholarship. It is also to find a way of talking about culture that is neither vague and merely impressionistic (like a tourist), nor misleadingly dogmatic so that complex communal ways of life are labelled 'cultures' as if they were monolithic and uniform, and irreducibly different from other cultures. On the one hand, there is a danger in using the concept of culture in a way that assumes an inevitable similarity between people who are different in important ways. On the other, the danger is in assuming an irreducible difference between the 'other' and 'us', when in fact much may be shared and bridges of understanding can be built that make culture highly 'porous' - open to cross-influence, mutual learning, recognition of commonalities, and inter-group translation of experience, beliefs, aspirations and attachments. This article's aim is to outline a theoretical framework that might be helpful in addressing some of the complexities of culture in social studies of law. It presents ideas about culture, comparison and community in law at a fairly high level of abstraction. But my hope is that the ideas are broad enough and sensitive enough to have some local resonance, and that they may be criticised and tested to explore their applicability for legal studies in specific contexts. Certainly, they are grounded in traditions of social theory that are almost entirely western. Although the ideas in this article reflect a strong interest in comparative legal studies and legal history, I know that they cannot entirely escape the predominantly English common law experience that has shaped their author. All of us inhabit cultures that, in part, we are aware of. But, in part, insofar as culture forms us and makes us who we are, we are not conscious of it. To understand culture it is necessary somehow to step outside ourselves, observing ourselves participating in life, and up to a point this is possible. Observation and participation cannot ultimately be separated. We necessarily observe the situation * This article is adapted from a paper given at the National Law School of India University, Bangalore, India on ii August 2005.

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