"When Law Became Cultivated: 'European Legal Culture' between Kultur and Civilization", by Helge Dedek, is now available on SSRN.
Abstract: In this contribution, I invite the reader to approach the
concept of ‘European legal culture’ from a historical perspective. Such an
approach is helpful in two ways: first, it helps to attune one’s ear to the
shades of meaning of ‘culture’ and to enhance awareness of the fact that ‘legal
culture’ may have a different ring in different legal traditions. Second, as we
shall see, it is the discourse on ‘legal culture’ itself, and especially the
discourse on ‘European legal culture’, that seeks historical legitimacy by
cultivating foundational narratives, invoking, in particular, the writings of
the German Historical School and its most well-known proponent, Friedrich Carl
von Savigny. I will present ‘snapshots’ of some of the foundational moments in
the career of the concept of ‘legal culture’, and then, after a short comparison
with contemporary English usage, set out to inquire which role ‘legal culture’
may be said to play in Savigny’s famous manifesto, Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für
Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (Of the Vocation of our Age for Legislation
and Legal Science, written in 1814). I want to suggest that re-reading Savigny’s
text with the historical semantics of ‘culture’ between the French
‘civilisation’ and the German ‘Kultur’ in mind will help us to see more clearly
some aspects of the text that are at times obscured in its ‘culturist’ readings
that are too eager to find a romantic conception ‘Volksgeistlehre’ in Savigny’s
work. These often neglected aspects might hint to an openness toward the
possibility of thinking a legal culture beyond the nation state, and might give
us, perhaps counterintuitively, some useful cues for a reflection on possible
theoretical approaches to a ‘European legal culture’.This chapter will appear in the forthcoming G Helleringer and K Purnhagen (eds), Towards a European Legal Culture
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