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This paper discusses three major approaches to the connection between law and culture.
The first approach is that of the historical school, which arose in German jurisprudence in the first half of the nineteenth century. It views law as a product of the national culture, embedded in the daily practices of a people. Statutes are not supposed to create law; their function is to reflect these practices. As each people has its own language, expressing its unique national spirit, so it also has its own distinctive law. This approach was adopted by the Movement for the Revival of Hebrew Law that was active in Eretz Israel in the first half of the twentieth century, as it sought to counter the influence of English law in the period of the British Mandate.
The second, constitutive approach developed in American jurisprudence in the 1980s. It views law as participating in the constitution of culture and thereby of people’s consciousness and social relations. This approach thus takes the influence between law and culture to move in the opposite direction to that assumed by the historical approach; in both, however, law is an inseparable dimension of social relations.
The third approach, which is to be found in twentieth-century Anglo-American jurisprudence, views the law created and applied by the courts as a distinct cultural system in its own right. Practitioners of the law internalize this culture in the course of their studies and professional activity, so that it comes to constitute, direct and delimit the way they think, argue, resolve cases and provide justifications. Thus, while there is objectivity in the law, there is also a degree of inconsistency in its application, because in many cases the legal culture allows for more than one possible solution. Law professionals bring to their decisions their personalities, life-experiences, views, cultural backgrounds, etc., and these play an important role in the way they utilize the materials of the legal culture.