Vol. 16 No. 9 (September, 2006) pp.767-768

 

LAW AS CULTURE: AN INVITATION, by Lawrence Rosen.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.  230pp. Cloth. $24.95/£15.95. ISBN: 0691125554.

 

Reviewed by Paul Parker, Social Science Division, Truman State University.  Email: parker [at] truman.edu.

 

Lawyer and anthropologist Lawrence Rosen has written a thought provoking little book.  As you would expect from an anthropologist, law is not Universal in the sense it is True, but it “may be worthwhile . . . to think of law as universal in this one sense – as a marvelous entry to the study of that most central of human features, culture itself, and hence an open invitation . . . to thinking about what and who we are” (p.200).

 

This quote is substantially the last sentence of the book.  The previous pages include a preface, an Introduction, and four main chapters. After a two-page Conclusion, the book finishes with 12 pages of “For Further Reading” – essay notes – and a very short index.  The four chapters are: “Law and Social Control,” “Creating Facts,” “Reason, Power, Law,” and “Law as Cosmology.” 

 

The four main chapters demonstrate the manners in which law is not Universal, across either space or time, and links variation to social custom and need.  The universality then comes in law’s connection to human and social activity: “a key role for most legal systems, quite apart from addressing disputes, consists precisely in their ability to help maintain the sense of cosmological order” (pp.170-71). 

 

Chapter 1 includes a suggestion to think of “families of law,” based on whether they “treat law as an arm of central governance” (civil law), distribute power widely among counterbalancing institutions (common law) or “maintain legitimacy of established practices (traditional legal orders) (pp.40-41).  Then we begin to think how law is connected to broader cultural practices and institutions.  For example, Kleptomania emerges with the department store, as a condition afflicting women who were not, in Victorian times, free to wander about.  Kleptomania remains today in the DSM-IV a condition mostly afflicting women (p.181).  Functionalist explanations for the taboo of incest really wash out, suggesting that such taboos are about delineating culture, and thus identity (pp.174-75).  Similarly, our stubborn refusal to eat puppies (p.169).  The evolution of trial from ordeal to the jury, and the rules for what counts as evidence and expert testimony all show the changing nature of how cultures through the law work at Creating Facts (Chapter 2).  Thus, Arab cultures investigate the accused’s background and social ties; civil law systems investigate past wrongful behavior; and common law systems stick more narrowly to the alleged act (pp.98-104). This example also serves to demonstrate how different cultures reason, how people in different cultures relate (pp.136-142), and thus demonstrates Reason, Power [and; in] Law (Chapter 3). [*768]

 

The central point of the book is simple to grasp.  The recursive examples make it a book difficult to read around in, but do reward a reading of the whole work.  In a contradictory claim, there is a lot here, and there is a lot not here.  Two endorsements on the dust jacket acknowledge this: one refers to both the work’s “breadth” and “brevity,” and the other notes the “broad overview” and “succinct” analysis.  Indeed, there are many audaciously broad claims, but if it is careful argumentation and thorough documentation you want, look elsewhere.  There are a dozen pages of notes for further reading, but they are breezy and not recursive: if you want the references to work on the French jury system discussed in Chapter 3 (p.160), you will do best to read the notes to Chapter 2.  But if you want “to see . . . how parts of a society and culture may be connected to one another and then to bring these possibilities, both as generalizations and as heuristic devices, back to a fuller understanding of a given system”(p.67) consider accepting Rosen’s invitation. 

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Paul Parker.