BETWEEN HISTORY AND SOCIOLOGY – REMARKS ON DIFFERENCES IN PERCEIVING “LEGAL CULTURE” AS A SUBJECT OF INTEREST BY VARIOUS DISCIPLINES OF JURISPRUDENCE, PARTICULARLY SOCIOLOGY OF LAW AND THE DISCIPLINES OF THE HISTORY OF LAW
Main Article Content
Abstract
One of the “pivotal” terms, showing the diversity of phenomena related to the cultural embedding of law is that of legal culture. It is used to describe the diversity of approaches to law as well as of the opinions on how this term is understood, on the role of social order, the practice of law application. The article deals with differences in the research approaches of various jurisprudential disciplines. Among the many topics covered in the article, the authors emphasize in particular the differences between the concept of “legal culture” in the textbooks of the history of law and social sciences, opposing legal history approach by that of legal sociology or philosophy of law. Striking in the attitude to the history of the numerous concepts of legal culture is the treatment of the historical phenomena not as an objective social, economic, or political reality, but as a certain intellectual construct that aims to “complete and justify the concept”. This is a purely instrumental approach: the possible phenomena from the past serve to strengthen and justify the shape of the contemporary reflection. This applies both to approaches that describe the legal culture as a predominantly historical phenomenon and to those that treat historical description as supplemental reasoning. It is also accompanied by far-reaching “presentism” as an attitude in the study of the phenomena from the past. Consequently, this may lead to a situation that extremely synthetic and abstract judgments relating to the past phenomena as the culture and the society can be misleading in the study and description of the legal culture insofar as one may combine events from the distant past with characteristics which they had not or reconstruct facts that probably did not occur.
Article Details
Copyright and originality of the offered manuscript
1. It is assumed that the manuscript offered has not been previously published. It is expected that the authors will inform the editorial board of TLQ if the entire manuscript, its parts or some relevant results have been previously published in a different publication at the level of an article in a reviewed scientific magazine or monograph. Should the editorial board of TLQ conclude that this condition was not fulfilled the review process may be terminated.
2. It is assumed that the submitted manuscript is an original academic work. If that is not the case the author needs to provide information regarding all circumstances that could raise doubts whether the manuscript is the outcome of original research.
3. By submitting the manuscript the author acknowledges that after the publication in The Lawyer Quarterly her/his work will be made available online to the Internet users and also kept by the Library of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. Author's rights to further use the work remain unabridged.