Law as Culture: An Invitation by Lawrence Rosen
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2006.00631.x |
| Author | Simon Roberts |
| Date | 01 January 2007 |
| Published date | 01 January 2007 |
REVIEWS
Lawrence Rosen,Law as Culture: An Invitation,New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 2006, xiv þ230 pp, hb d15.95.
Lawrence Rosen’s latest book,Law as Culture, appears at a mome nt when the ambi-
tion to reconnect‘‘law’’with a wider cultural context is increasingly articulated by
North American law school professors. After a long period of introspection,
ru¥ed onlyat the margins byan embryonic sociologyof law and then thecritical
legal studies movement, there are some signsof a move away fromthe established
task of professional commentary on superior court decisions that has been the
hallmark oftheir legal scholarship.This move is characterized by a strong interest
in ethnography and cultural theory. An early programmatic statement by Paul
Kahn in The Cultural Study of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)
called for a radical separation of ‘legal theory from legal practice’ and the renova-
tion of legal scholarship through infusion from the social sciences. Kahn claimed:
‘There is remarkably little studyof the culture of the rule of law itself as a distinct
wayof understanding and perceiving meaning in the events of our political and
social life.To take up such a study requires turning legal scholarship away from
the project of law reform’ (p.1). In making this call for a‘new discipline of law’
(p.43) he urged that‘we approach law’s rule as the imaginative construction of a
complete worldview, we need to bring to its study those techniques that take as
their object the experience of meaning’ (p. 2). Kahn’s focus on culture, and the
corresponding view of law as cosmology, was taken up again by Oscar Chase in
Law, Culture,and Ritual (NewYork: NYU Press, 2005) where he set out to explore
the‘connection betweenculture and disputing processes’ (p. 2). He contended that
dispute processes ‘are in large part a re£ection of the culture in which they are
embedded;they are not an autonomoussystem that is predominantlythe product
of insulatedspecialists and experts’ (p.2). Further, this relationshipis re£exive:‘the
processes by which disputes are addressedwill be an in£uential ingredient in the
ongoing social task of maintaining or ‘‘constructing’’ the culture in which theyare
located’ (p.138). In negotiatingthis shift to new ground^ for Chase a scary matter
combining‘terror and elation’ in a release of apparentlyPauline dimensions(p.141)
^ both he and Kahn acknowledge a primary debt to the late Cli¡ord Geertz’s
seminal essay on law in Local Kn owled ge (NewYor k: Basic Book s,1983).
Rosen, a professor of anthropology at Princeton and of law at Columbia who
has written earlierpath-breaking books on Islamic culture and law, appears at ¢rst
sight to be working within the same genre as Kahn and Chase. He invites us to
regard law as cosmology and presents his book as an‘attempt to entice the reader
into seeing law as constituted by culture, and culture (in no small way) by law’
(p. xii). But he has his eye on a bigger project than the overhaul of North Amer-
ican legal scholarship. In a beautifully written, at moments almost poetic work,
r2007 The Authors. Journal Compilation r2007 The Modern Law ReviewLimited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2007) 70(1)MLR 161^174
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