European Legal Cultures in Transition

Åse B. Grødeland is senior researcher at Fafo Institute for Applied International Studies, Oslo, Norway. Her forthcoming publications on legal culture include The End of National Legal Culture? The Case of Norway (with Janne H. Matlary and Morten Kinander, 2016). William L. Miller is Professor Emeritus and former Edward Caird Professor of Politics at the University of Glasgow. His most recent books include Multicultural Nationalism: Islamophobia, Anglophobia and Devolution (with Asifa Hussain, 2006) and The Open Economy and its Enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe (with Jane Duckett, Cambridge, 2006).

• Preface; 1. One European legal culture or several?; 2. Concept/meaning of 'law'; 3. Law in principle; 4. Law in action; 5. Perceptions of legal outsiders; 6. Perceptions of legal insiders; 7. Legal change and legal transfers; 8. Muslims and Euro-migrants as carriers of legal culture; 9. Balancing civil rights against a 'war on terror'; 10. The role of religiosity in European popular legal cultures; 11. A European legal culture?; Appendix: data collection.

'… Ase B. Grodeland and William L. Miller published one of the most important studies of legal culture to date … the text covers some 500 pages and it is replete with dozens and dozens of tables, and extensive quotes from interviews. The result is a rich and unprecedented study of European legal culture … The authors and researchers who worked on this book deserve our thanks for their monumental enterprise. Legal culture has changed, and will continue to change. Nonetheless, for the reasons suggested, this snapshot of legal culture in five countries is both illuminating and important; and its messages and methods, I think, are of great significance for the world of legal scholarship.' Lawrence M. Friedman, Perspectives on Europe