The “Cultural” – In An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture

Russell Miller will present his new textbook An Introduction to German Law and Legal Culture (Cambridge University Press), which is the first new, comprehensive survey of German law in a generation. As a matter of discipline – and theory – the book self-consciously positions itself as a work of comparative law. But is it? Some comparative legal scholars might dismiss it as merely “foreign legal studies” because its exclusive study of the German legal system, conducted by a scholar positioned outside that system, does not involve the systematic juxtaposition of two or more legal phenomena to identify their similarities and differences. Nor is the book a work of socio-legal studies or law-and-anthropology. It is neither theoretically rigorous enough nor does it employ the empirical method. The book’s disciplinary ambition is best captured by the claim in its title that it introduces German legal culture. It does not, however, resort to the strained and contested concept of legal culture that has been the subject of critical work in the anthropology of law or the law-and-society movement. Instead, it reaches out to the meaning of culture that informs the discipline known as cultural studies and it calls on comparative legal studies to embrace that work as part of its enterprise. The book asks the question: How should one survey and present a discrete legal system? It answers that question with the appeal to make comparative law “cultural.”.