Law and Cultural Conflict
![handle is hein.journals/chknt78 and id is 511 raw text is: LAW AND CULTURAL CONFLICT
ROBERT POST*
The subject of this symposium, law and cultural conflict, is
wide-ranging and various. Even if we sharply narrow our focus to the
judicial institutions by which the state declares and enforces its
official vision of social order, law is multifarious in its purposes and
functions. Cultural conflicts also come in radically diverse forms.
Taken together, the permutations are staggering in their array and
complexity. It is not surprising that debates about law and cultural
conflict sometimes lose traction, because participants can so easily
talk past each other by emphasizing different aspects of the larger
subject.
The most useful contribution I can make as an introductory
speaker, therefore, is to chart the overall contours of the topic which
this conference seeks to address. My effort shall be to sketch an
analytic framework that is sufficiently general to mediate usefully
among the widely disparate views that participants in this conference
will no doubt bring to bear on its three major topics: family, expres-
sion, and religion.
I
We can begin with a relatively simple picture of the relationship
between law and culture. Patrick Devlin famously argued that the
law should be used to enforce the norms of a society's culture:
[S]ociety means a community of ideas; without shared ideas on
politics, morals, and ethics no society can exist.... If men and
women try to create a society in which there is no fundamental
agreement about good and evil they will fail; if, having based it on
common agreement, the agreement goes, the society will disinte-
grate. For society is not something that is kept together physically;
* Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of Law, School of Law, University of
California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall). I am grateful for the helpful comments of Ira Ellman, Steve
Heyman, Ken Karst, Andrew Koppelman, David Lieberman, Nancy Rosenblum, Austin Sarat
and Reva Siegel. I am also grateful for the able research assistance of Victoria Boesch.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/chknt78&div=26&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Law and Cultural Conflict
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