European Legal Cultures in Transition

by Åse B. Grødeland, William L. Miller

Overview

Are national legal cultures in Europe converging or diverging as a result of the pressures of European legal integration? Åse B. Grødeland and William L. Miller address this question by exploring the attitudes and perceptions of the general public and law professionals in five European countries: England, Norway, Bulgaria, Poland and the Ukraine. Presenting new findings, they challenge the established view that ordinary citizens and people working professionally with the law have different legal cultures. Their research in fact reveals that the attitudes of citizens in Eastern and Western Europe towards 'law-in-principle' are remarkably similar, whereas perceptions of 'law-in-practice' differ by country and often correlate with GDP per capita and country ranking in rule of law indices. Grødeland and Miller's innovative methodological approach will appeal to both experts and non-experts with an interest in legal culture, European integration, or European elite and public opinion.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107050358
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/24/2015
Pages:	590
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.26(d)

About the Author

Åse B. Grødeland is senior researcher at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, Norway. Her forthcoming publications on legal culture include The End of National Legal Culture? The Case of Norway (with Janne H. Matlary and Morten Kinander, 2016).

William L. Miller is Professor Emeritus and former Edward Caird Professor of Politics at the University of Glasgow. His most recent books include Multicultural Nationalism: Islamophobia, Anglophobia and Devolution (with Asifa Hussain, 2006) and The Open Economy and its Enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe (with Jane Duckett, Cambridge, 2006).

Table of Contents

Preface; 1. One European legal culture or several?; 2. Concept/meaning of 'law'; 3. Law in principle; 4. Law in action; 5. Perceptions of legal outsiders; 6. Perceptions of legal insiders; 7. Legal change and legal transfers; 8. Muslims and Euro-migrants as carriers of legal culture; 9. Balancing civil rights against a 'war on terror'; 10. The role of religiosity in European popular legal cultures; 11. A European legal culture?; Appendix: data collection.

Editorial Reviews

'… Ase B. Grodeland and William L. Miller published one of the most important studies of legal culture to date … the text covers some 500 pages and it is replete with dozens and dozens of tables, and extensive quotes from interviews. The result is a rich and unprecedented study of European legal culture … The authors and researchers who worked on this book deserve our thanks for their monumental enterprise. Legal culture has changed, and will continue to change. Nonetheless, for the reasons suggested, this snapshot of legal culture in five countries is both illuminating and important; and its messages and methods, I think, are of great significance for the world of legal scholarship.' Lawrence M. Friedman, Perspectives on Europe

'On the whole, the book is well written and clear, in spite of the complexity of the authors' theoretical framework. It furthers in many ways the understanding of the processes of convergence and divergence of European legal cultures and provides convincing explanations of the causes of these processes that could be further developed in future studies.' Liviu Damsa, Europe-Asia Studies

From the Publisher