Justice Law And Culture

The following pages contain a theory of justice and a theory of law. Justice will be defined as the demand for a system of laws, and law as an established regulation which applies equally throughout a society and is backed by force. The demand for a system of laws is met by means of a legal system. The theory will have to include what the system and the laws are in tended to regulate. The reference is to all men and their possessions in a going concern. In the past all such theories have been discussed only in terms of society, justice as applicable to society and the laws promul gated within it. However, men and their societies are not the whole story: in recent centuries artifacts have played an increasingly important role. To leave them out of all consideration in the theory would be to leave the theory itself incomplete and even distorted. For the key conception ought to be one not of society but of culture. Society is an organization of men but culture is something more. I define culture (civilization has often been employed as a synonym) as an organization of men together with their material possessions. Such possessions consist in artifacts: material objects which have been altered through human agency in order to reduce human needs. The makers of the artifacts are altered by them. Men have their possessions together, and this objectifies and consolidates the culture.

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokémon; the ecological justice of Nausicaä; Shinto’s focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan’s popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

An analysis of the relationships between law, custom, gender, marriage and justice among northern Tanzania’s Maasai communities. When, where, why, and by whom is law used to force desired social change in the name of justice? Why has culture come to be seen as inherently oppressive to women? In this finely crafted book, Dorothy L. Hodgson examines the history of legal ideas and institutions in Tanzania—from customary law to human rights—as specific forms of justice that often reflect elite ideas about gender, culture, and social change. Drawing on evidence from Maasai communities, she explores how the legacies of colonial law-making continue to influence contemporary efforts to create laws, codify marriage, criminalize FGM, and contest land grabs by state officials. Despite the easy dismissal by elites of the priorities and perspectives of grassroots women, she shows how Maasai women have always had powerful ways to confront and challenge injustice, express their priorities, and reveal the limits of rights-based legal ideals. “This is a book that only Dorothy Hodgson could have written, with her decades of work in Tanzania, vast networks in Maasailand, and deep ethnographic knowledge, combined with her deftness in working through more theoretical work on gender and human rights. Closely argued, conceptually sharp, and engagingly written.” —Brett Shadle, author of Girl Cases: Marriage and Colonialism in Gusiiland, Kenya, 1890-1970 “Dorothy Hodgson asks a number of important and clearly articulated questions, and provides thoughtful answers to them using a hybrid of historical and anthropological methodologies that combine in-depth case studies with more empirically-informed macro-level reflection. A concise and useful resource in the undergraduate as well as the graduate classroom.” —Priya Lal, author of African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania: Between the Village and the World “Gender, Justice, and the Problem of Culture makes a significant contribution to the study of law in East Africa and elsewhere among colonized peoples, and it should be required reading not only for academics interested in such matters but for activists and policymakers.” —American Anthropologist “Hodgson’s book is both rich in detail and broad in its implications for understanding struggles for justice for marginalised groups. It deserves the attention of students and scholars of African studies, anthropology, history, political science and women’s and gender studies.” —Journal of Modern African Studies

This pioneering book explores the intersections of law and culture at the International Criminal Court (ICC), offering insights into how notions of culture affect the Court’s legal foundations, functioning and legitimacy, both in theory and in practice.

An analysis of the cultural and social functions of law, legal processes and legal rituals in late medieval northern France. It interprets the various influences upon the shaping of law as a cultural manifestation and its application as an actual system of justice.

Law has often been seen as a relatively autonomous domain, one in which a professional elite sharply control the impact of broader social relations and cultural concepts. By contrast this study asserts that the analysis of legal systems, like the analysis of social systems generally, requires an understanding of the concepts and relationships encountered in everyday social life. Using as its substantive base the Islamic law courts of Morocco, the study explores the cultural basis of judicial discretion. From the proposition that in Arabic culture relationships are subject to considerable negotiation the idea is developed that the shaping of facts in a court of law, the use of local experts, and the organization of the judicial structure all contribute to the reliance on local concepts and personnel to inform the range of judicial discretion. By drawing comparisons with the exercise of judicial discretion in America the study demonstrates that cultural concepts deeply inform the evaluation of issues and the shapes of a judge's decision. The Anthropology of Justice is not only the first full-scale study of the actual operations of the actual operations of a modern Islamic law court anywhere in the Arab world but a demonstration of the theoretical basis on which a cultural analysis of the law may be founded.

Law is integral to culture, and culture to law. Often considered a distinctive domain with strange rules and stranger language, law is actually part of a culture's way of expressing its sense of the order of things. In Law as Culture, Lawrence Rosen invites readers to consider how the facts that are adduced in a legal forum connect to the ways in which facts are constructed in other areas of everyday life, how the processes of legal decision-making partake of the logic by which the culture as a whole is put together, and how courts, mediators, or social pressures fashion a sense of the world as consistent with common sense and social identity. While the book explores issues comparatively, in each instance it relates them to contemporary Western experience. The development of the jury and Continental legal proceedings thus becomes a story of the development of Western ideas of the person and time; African mediation techniques become tests for the style and success of similar efforts in America and Europe; the assertion that one's culture should be considered as an excuse for a crime becomes a challenge to the relation of cultural norms and cultural diversity. Throughout the book, the reader is invited to approach law afresh, as a realm that is integral to every culture and as a window into the nature of culture itself.

"A classic collection in the anthropology of law. While some exceptionally good descriptive work is presented, the volume is particularly valuable in providing a range of thoughtful, engaged, and empirically grounded theoretical explorations of issues in the comparative study of law and conflict."—Donald Brenneis, author of Dangerous Words

The intersections of law and contemporary culture are vital for comprehending the meaning and significance of law in today’s world. Far from being unsophisticated mass entertainment, comics and graphic fiction both imbue our contemporary culture, and are themselves imbued, with the concerns of law and justice. Accordingly, and spanning a wide variety of approaches and topics from an international array of contributors, Graphic Justice draws comics and graphic fiction into the range of critical resources available to the academic study of law. The first book to do this, Graphic Justice broadens our understanding of law and justice as part of our human world—a world that is inhabited not simply by legal concepts and institutions alone, but also by narratives, stories, fantasies, images, and other cultural articulations of human meaning. Engaging with key legal issues (including copyright, education, legal ethics, biomedical regulation, and legal personhood) and exploring critical issues in criminal justice and perspectives on international rights, law and justice—all through engagement with comics and graphic fiction—the collection showcases the vast breadth of potential that the medium holds. Graphic Justice will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in: cultural legal studies; law and the image; law, narrative and literature; law and popular culture; cultural criminology; as well as cultural and comics studies more generally.

This volume surveys 150 law books of fundamental importance in the history of Western legal literature and culture. The entries are organized in three sections: the first dealing with the transitional period of fifteenth-century editions of medieval authorities, the second spanning the early modern period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the third focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors are scholars from all over the world. Each ‘old book’ is analyzed by a recognized specialist in the specific field of interest. Individual entries give a short biography of the author and discuss the significance of the works in the time and setting of their publication, and in their broader influence on the development of law worldwide. Introductory essays explore the development of Western legal traditions, especially the influence of the English common law, and of Roman and canon law on legal writers, and the borrowings and interaction between them. The book goes beyond the study of institutions and traditions of individual countries to chart a broader perspective on the transmission of legal concepts across legal, political, and geographical boundaries. Examining the branches of this genealogical tree of books makes clear their pervasive influence on modern legal systems, including attempts at rationalizing custom or creating new hybrid systems by transplanting Western legal concepts into other jurisdictions.