Explorations in Legal Cultures

This special issue of Recht der Werkelijkheid (edited by Fred Bruinsma and David Nelken) is dedicated to the topic of exploring legal cultures. The contributors to this volume are concerned principally with the potentialities of the idea of legal culture as a term of art in socio-legal enquiry. If legal cultures need to be explored, so does the concept itself. What units are we referring to when we use this term? What gives them their alleged coherence? And how can we avoid our explanations from being tautologies? The concept of legal culture continues to excite interest. However the term is to be used, it would be unwise to reify it by treating it as anything more –or anything less- than a meaningful way of speaking about how legally related social behaviour fits together.