INTRODUCTION

Thirty years ago Lawrence Friedman introduced the concept of “legal culture,” and it quickly became a major organizing concept in sociolegal studies. Inspired by the work of Willard Hurst, Gabriel Almond, and Sidney Verba, he argued that law is best understood as a system of social forces, one that both produces and responds to these forces. He invited scholars to embrace the concept of “legal culture,” move beyond their traditional concern with doctrine, and instead explore the social forces that give rise to law and legal change. He was particularly interested in forces that give rise to legal change and, in turn, the impact law has on society. It was broadly an appeal for empirical inquiry sources and the effects of the law.

To facilitate systematic inquiry Friedman distinguished between external legal culture and internal legal culture. The former includes those social factors “constantly at work on the law” and those “parts of general culture – customs, opinions, ways of doing and thinking – that bend social forces toward or away from the law.” Internal legal culture includes the distinct culture of legal professionals and allied actors who work within the legal system. According to Friedman, although law is far from an autonomous self-regulating system, nevertheless those few specialists who administer it and possess expert knowledge of it are far from passive actors responding to uncontrollable social forces. In reacting to these forces, they have, within limits, the capacity to shape and refine them.