US Legal Culture

“In this [course], we address the audience of [students] for whom American culture is not the mother culture. It may well also provide some insights to the U.S. American student as well. The U.S. American student may find that this sort of approach helps one to hold the relationships of American law to American culture up to the light, rather than passively allowing the culture to rest as unexamined wallpaper in the background, or worse – as a static set of facts.

The [course] is divided into what we call „reference frames“. Each reference frame is a way of seeing U.S. law as a set or responses to perceived problems, which can then be studied through a variety of frames, or lenses. Studying the law through the lenses of lawyer himself is only one way to do so, and when doing so, far too often we find that a student stops with only one, over-simplified distinction of common law from civil law in that the former is derived from judicial decisions and the latter is derived from statutes. Were it so simple, the exercise of comparison would hardly be worth considering, and would be a short, rather boring exercise of listing and juxtaposing sources of law. To understand the law is to understand the culture in which the law operates. In this [course], the non-U.S. student will have the opportunity to consider the various aspects of study which constitute the comportment by which the American lawyer approaches the law, and recognize that the process of study in the common law is not to memorize a list of norms [...].”

- Prof. W. Kirk Junker

The book "Legal Culture in the United States: An Introduction" by Prof. Junker can be downloaded when connected to the network of the University of Cologne: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/legal-culture-united-states-introduction-kirk-junker/10.4324/9781315629940